Posted on 11/27/2017 5:35:55 PM PST by spintreebob
The CMS' Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program was an expensive wake-up call. Hospital leaders needed to prevent patients from making a U-turn after discharged. The hospital was hit with a $397,153 penalty.
The penalty program established under the Affordable Care Act has motivated hospitals to change care practices. Readmissions have fallen as hospitals respond to penalties that can dock up to 3% of their Medicare payments. (excerpts from article.)
But the tactics hospitals have adopted to avoid a penalty might not always be in the best interest of patients. As hospitals reduced readmissions for heart failure mortality rates increased.
Financial incentives from the readmissions program can influence hospital behavior, and not always for the better.
"The big penalty has meant hospitals put less attention on reducing complications and reducing mortality."
The CMS' own math has placed a higher value on reducing readmissions than improving mortality rates. Under the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program, high mortality numbers cost a hospital 0.2% of its Medicare payments, compared with a 3% readmissions penalty.
The CMS said it "monitors the impact of our programs"
Given the challenges of caring for heart failure patients, it's plausible that tactics hospitals adopt to avoid readmissions have a negative impact on patients' survival rates, said Jason Hockenberry, Emory U.
"We still don't understand what these incentives are doing to care processes, and how they might be impacting patients," he said. "Are they satisfied with their care? That is unclear at this point."
The CMS also adopted the program across all acute-care hospitals without much insight or evidence into how it will impact hospitals. "We have no idea whether reducing readmissions is going to have an impact on health outcomes," Hockenberry said.
There are unintended consequences...
(Excerpt) Read more at modernhealthcare.com ...
The patient is just a widget in the CMS process. The patient is not the customer. The CMS process is not designed to help the patient. The hospital response is designed to be paid and to avoid being hassled by CMS.
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So healthcare decisions made by bureaucrats don’t always turn out well for the patient.
Who would have ever seen that one coming?
It’s simple. Patients who are dead don’t cost the government valuable money that can be used to buy votes.
My wife just had a procedure that required an overnight stay in the hospital. When she was released she had to sign a document that acknowledged she had not been actually admitted to the hospital. So they are learning to get around this.
LOL, so it was the “bed and breakfast” wing of the hotel ?
Bingo!
And the libs said "You stupid conservatives -- there ARE NO Death Panels in Obamacare."
it’s called over night observation, hospitals get paid at a different rate of outpatient observation then inpatient stays.
Government regulations destroyed Medicare long ago
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