In 2011, 12.3 percent of
Medicare hospital admissions were followed by a potentially preventable
readmission, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission
(MedPAC), which has just released its latest Report to Congress on Medicare and the Health Care Delivery System.
To be clear from the outset,
not all potentially preventable admissions can be avoided. A
classification system developed by 3M Health Information Systems and
discussed in the MedPAC report defines a potentially preventable
readmission “as a readmission that is clinically related to the initial
hospitalization in that the underlying reason for the readmission may be
plausibly related to the care during and immediately after a prior
hospital stay. A clinically related readmission may have resulted from a
process of care or treatment during the prior admission or from a lack
of postdischarge follow-up rather than from unrelated events that
occurred after the prior admission.”
Preventing readmissions
typically depends more on primary...
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