Hospital Quality Spotlight on Readmissions

Preventing avoidable readmissions is an important component of hospitals’ ongoing quality improvement efforts. Understanding the phenomena and intervening in the most effective manner is essential to success in national efforts to improve patient outcomes and curtail health care spending. Recent clinical research, value-based purchasing policies and transparency initiatives from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have focused a growing amount of attention and resource allocation aimed at curbing expensive hospital inpatient readmissions. A recent study places the annual number of 30-day readmissions in the U.S. at 3.3 million, with a price tag of $41.3 billion.

Read the Report