A recent report says Pennsylvania is not making enough progress reducing hospital readmissions, which is a national public health challenge and a priority among the medical community.
While not all readmissions are preventable, focusing on those that are and implementing evidence-based strategies to prevent them is key to improving the quality of patient care and decreasing health care costs.
A recent report released in February 2011 by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) found that readmission rates are higher in cases where a health-care-associated infection (HAI) exists.
Among Pennsylvania patients who acquired an HAI during their initial hospitalization in 2009, 29.8 percent were readmitted within 30 days due to an infection or complication. Of those who did not contract an HAI, 6.2 percent were readmitted for an infection or complication.
Additional key findings include:
- Patients who acquired surgical site infections during their initial hospitalization accounted for the highest percentage of readmissions for an infection or complication at 53.6 percent.
- 29.5 percent of Medicare patients age 65 and older who contracted an HAI during their initial hospitalization were readmitted within 30 days due to infection or complication. The estimated combined Medicare payment for these readmissions was more than $24.6 million.
“The data suggest that if you contract an infection in the hospital, you are more likely to be rehospitalized,” said Joe Martin, PHC4’s executive director in the report. “We don’t know why that is or how much the initial infection contributes to the readmission, but it may present opportunities for quality improvement and cost containment.”
Read the Hospital Performance Report (HPR) – Spring Update, which includes information from April 1, 2009 through March 31, 2010.