High-frequency hospital users: The tail that wags the readmissions dog.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

To describe the characteristics of high-frequency hospital users (four or more hospitalizations in a year) and the consequences of including or excluding their data from a readmission-based measure.

Data sources

2015 and 2016 Massachusetts Medicaid data.

Study design

We compare demographics, morbidity burden, and social risk factors for high- and low-frequency hospital users, and membership in 17 accountable care organizations. We evaluate how excluding hospitalizations of high-frequency users from a 30-day readmission measure (with or without risk adjustment) changes its rate and variability and affects performance rankings of accountable care organizations. The outcome is readmission within 30 days; each live discharge from a hospital contributes one obser

SUBMITTER: Fouayzi H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9108072 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature