Decreases In Readmissions Credited to Medicare's Program to Reduce Hospital Readmissions Have Been Overstated

Christopher  Ody; Lucy  Msall; Leemore S. Dafny; David  Grabowski; David  Cutler

Article | Health Affairs

Decreases In Readmissions Credited to Medicare's Program to Reduce Hospital Readmissions Have Been Overstated

by Christopher Ody, Lucy Msall, Leemore S. Dafny, David Grabowski and David Cutler

Abstract

Medicare’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) has been credited with lowering risk-adjusted readmission rates for targeted conditions at general acute care hospitals. However, these reductions appear to be illusory or overstated. This is because a concurrent change in electronic transaction standards allowed hospitals to document a larger number of diagnoses per claim, which had the effect of reducing risk-adjusted patient readmission rates. Prior studies of the HRRP relied upon control groups’ having lower baseline readmission rates, which could falsely create the appearance that readmission rates are changing more in the treatment than in the control group. Accounting for the revised standards reduced the decline in risk-adjusted readmission rates for targeted conditions by 48 percent. After further adjusting for differences in pre-HRRP readmission rates across samples, we found that declines for targeted conditions at general acute care hospitals were statistically indistinguishable from declines in two control samples. Either the HRRP had no effect on readmissions, or it led to a system-wide reduction in readmissions that was roughly half as large as prior estimates have suggested.

Keywords: readmission rates; Hospitals; acute care hospitals; Medicare; myocardial infarction; heart failure; Health Care and Treatment;

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Ody, Christopher, Lucy Msall, Leemore S. Dafny, David Grabowski, and David Cutler. "Decreases In Readmissions Credited to Medicare's Program to Reduce Hospital Readmissions Have Been Overstated." Health Affairs 38, no. 1 (January 2019): 36–43.

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Decreases In Readmissions Credited to Medicare's Program to Reduce Hospital Readmissions Have Been Overstated

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