Hospital Check-ins May Slow Heart Failure Readmissions
May 5th, 2010
Source: USA Today
A new study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that, “nearly 20% of the 1 million heart failure patients admitted to U.S. hospitals each year are readmitted within a month. Heart failure is the leading cause of those readmissions, which overall cost Medicare $17 billion every year and amount to 20% of all Medicare payments, government data show.
The new study involved more than 30,000 Medicare patients, ages 65 and older, at 252 hospitals that supply data to an American Heart Association (AHA) quality-improvement program.
It found that more than half of the hospitals in the study failed to follow up with patients for a week after their discharge, though most are elderly, frail and taking a different mix of prescriptions or dosages.”
Read the complete article reported in USA Today: Hospital check-ins may slow heart failure readmissions.
You can also download a PDF version of the article from JAMA: Hospital Readmissions Among Survivors Six Months After Myocardial Revascularization
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Terry: Per page 3 of the dowloadable pdf results of the study from JAMA 96% (74) patients were discharged home and 4% (3) patients were discharged to another hospital.
A link to the study results from JAMA has been added in the blog post above. You can use this link to see the more comprehensive study results.
Where all these patients discharged home? Were some discharged to SNF level? If so, was there a difference in the readmit rate for the 2 populations.