Rehospitalizations cost billions, study finds
Posted on April 24, 2009 by: Bill Salganik | Category: Costs and Cost Controls
A stay in the hospital is expensive. And many patients wind up with more than one stay for one illness - they get sent home, but then need to go back into the hospital - making things doubly expensive.
A new study in New England Journal of Medicine found that a fifth of Medicare patients are readmitted to a hospital within a month of their discharge, and a third are readmitted within three months.
While some rehospitalizations are planned, such as for a treatment that needs to be done in stages, the study estimates that unplanned rehospitalizations cost Medicare $17.4 billion in 2004, the year for which the data was analyzed.
"Given the current financial situation, this is no longer something we can ignore," Dr. Anne-Marie J. Audet, a policy analyst for the Commonwealth Fund, told the New York Times. Dr. Stephen F. Jencks, the principal author of the study and a former Medicare official, is a consultant to Commonwealth, a foundation which researches health issues.
The study highlights another area where changes in the health system can both improve quality and save money, a joint goal which is among the priorities for 2009 for CWA's health care campaign.
According to the New England Journal study, the five states with the least frequent rehospitalizations have rates 45 percent better than the five states with the most frequent readmissions. While the data don't show why some states perform so much better than others, the article says, the differences indicate that improvement is possible. The study also notes that half of the readmitted patients didn't see a doctor after they got out of the hospital, suggesting that better follow-up care could reduce the rehospitalization rate.
The Obama administration is looking to save as much as $26 billion over ten years by cutting rates of rehospitalization and by cutting payments to hospitals which have unusually high readmission rates.
