Interesting article in News Medical on research findings, published this month in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, that indicate a potentially problematic relationship with data on mortality and hospital readmission currently used by the United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS. The research, by Johns Hopkins physicians and researchers, which examined three years of CMS’s publicly available data from hospitals across the US, found that hospitals with the highest rates of readmission were actually more likely to show better mortality scores in patients treated for heart failure, COPD and stroke. The researchers looked at nearly 4,500 acute-care facilities’ hospital-wide readmission rates and compared them with those facilities’ mortality rates in six areas used by CMS: heart attack, pneumonia, heart failure, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and coronary artery bypass.
Read more:
- Hospitals with high readmission rates more likely to show better mortality scores. News Medical
- Journal of Hospital Medicine http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1553-5606/issues