The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program

To the Editor: Zuckerman et al. (April 21 issue) 1 found that hospital readmissions for conditions targeted for penalties fell by 3.7 percentage points, whereas stays in observation units rose by 2.1 percentage points, yet they concluded that these two trends were not related because observation sta...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe New England journal of medicine Vol. 375; no. 5; pp. 493 - 494
Main Authors Woolhandler, Steffie, Himmelstein, David U, Gonzalez, Andrew A, Zuckerman, Rachael B, Sheingold, Steven H, Epstein, Arnold M
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Massachusetts Medical Society 04.08.2016
Subjects
Emergency services
Female
Fines & penalties
Hospital Administration - legislation & jurisprudence
Hospitals
Hospitals - statistics & numerical data
Humans
Male
Patient admissions
Patient Readmission - trends
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Summary:To the Editor: Zuckerman et al. (April 21 issue) 1 found that hospital readmissions for conditions targeted for penalties fell by 3.7 percentage points, whereas stays in observation units rose by 2.1 percentage points, yet they concluded that these two trends were not related because observation stays were rising even before the penalties were in place. Instead, the authors attribute continuously rising observation rates to hospitals’ confusion over the criteria used in audits of inpatient stays. It seems unlikely that confusion over these regulations continued to increase for many years, leading hospitals to sacrifice billions by billing for observation stays rather . . .
Bibliography:SourceType-Other Sources-1
content type line 63
ObjectType-Correspondence-1
ObjectType-Commentary-2
ISSN:0028-4793
1533-4406
DOI:10.1056/NEJMc1606658