Here’s Why This Is The Best Study On Readmissions To Date

>
By  |  March 31, 2016 | 

 

Love or hate readmission rates as an effective measure of institutional performance, the benchmark has become the coin of the realm for QI gurus, policy geeks, and stat crunchers.  As such, we see new journal releases every week–mostly data dives into large registries where the conclusions proffered are tentative at best.  Clinicians rarely get studies comprised of patient-level information whose findings may impact how to better organize their PI interventions and direct care.  That just changed (see excerpted table at bottom).

Andrew Auerbach, MD MPH and colleagues just published, Preventability and Causes of Readmissions in a National Cohort of General Medicine Patients in JAMA IM, and the results merit a deeper look.  Andy was kind enough to answer some questions regarding his group’s important paper for the blog.

Auerbach1Q:  Andy, first off, you and your collaborators should be congratulated on releasing the most exhaustive study on readmission root causes to date. For readers, can you tell us why your trial stands apart from the others and explain the findings?

Auerbach:  Thanks for the kind words – this was a gargantuan effort and involved nearly 100 people across all the HOMERuN sites – I’d run the risk of an Oscars acceptance speech if I tried to thank them all, but all of them have my deepest thanks.

Our study stands in contrast to others because we were truly national, and because we used a rigorous but reality-based review process to define preventability and its root causes.  Our research also took the perspective that the patient or the illness was never the sole or even primary reason for readmission, and that if a readmission took place the system was to blame.

 

Q:  You found a quarter of the patients in your cohort experienced a potentially preventable readmission. The number at first blush appears large. If one assumes a hypothetical readmit rate of say 16%, however, the universe of patients we might have an impact on lessens. Four percent. Through that lens, what can readers take away from your trial so they might improve the care of the remaining ninety-six?

Auerbach:  I am not sure I agree with that view in terms of the readmitted patient group, but 4% – if applied across the hundreds of thousands of patients discharged each month – is still a very large absolute number of patients.  Our study points out that preventable readmissions, whether prevalent in 4 or 8 or 12%, are still the minority of readmissions and need to be targeted with interventions in a prioritized manner which take into account the potential impact of each program.

 

Q:  While we are on the four percent theme, what do you make of all the “exceptional” interventions of MCOs and hospitals these days—be it telehealth, home visits, or dedicated disease pathways? Not a month can go by most of us don’t hear or see some organization engaged in some self-promotion or chest-puffing touting their readmit rates reductions from greater than 20% to less than 10%. I worry about the message given the data you and others have produced. It matters because we need a real floor on how low we can drop the metric?

Auerbach:  I agree that a readmission rate of zero or close to it is not reasonable, but I am quite unsure what the ‘right’ readmission rate is, because that number is a balance of patient preferences, societal preferences, and as you point out, payors’ needs.  So as you are managing exceptional programs, or choosing them carefully, our research suggests that you should really focus on admitting patients carefully, carefully assessing readiness for discharge among higher risk patients, and creating a safe landing place in terms of self-care and home supports.

 

Q:  You mention confounding and unmeasured variables in the discussion, perhaps limiting the analysis–as does the guest commenter. It’s a fact of life with this kind of research, though. So many things cluster together—and a myriad of patient experiences interconnect with multiplier effects we’ll never untangle. Do you think in the end, sussing out all the causes for return trips and the interventions to prevent them will lead us to the same place we started from? And by that I mean, a checklist of things we should apply to everyone and are on the clipboard already (medication reconciliation, set appointments, etc.)?

Auerbach:  I think that interventions like BOOST, Naylor’s program, RED, etc. have taken a programmatic ‘checklist’ approach which is incredibly valuable, but which has not yet translated into a right-sized, patient-customized checklist approach which exists separately from these larger programs.   There are indeed some mechanistic issues (discharge visits, medication reconciliation) which are important parts of the transition record, but our data suggest that cognitive issues around the ability to provide self-care or who to call after discharge are even more important.  In many cases we reviewed, the documentation of discharge visits and call back numbers was quite clear, but patients were actually deeply unsure about how to use these resources.

 

Q:  When I think of readmit rates and the CMS Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) these days, I am reminded of the old “less filling or taste great” saw. In the same vein, is the penalty reflecting an accurate quality measure or some utilization proxy hospitals have little control over? This is still unsettled science and the exchanges between the different camps while interesting to read, do not assist us in advancing where CMS will go with this measure or how we should apply it. What’s your opinion?

Auerbach:  I think readmission is an important measure but a blunt tool for deciding on where/how to chip away at the complex pathophysiology of poor care transitions.  Our data suggest that in many cases the readmission represents an error or problem which was produced by the acute care stay, but in an equally large proportion, the problems lay outside the hospital walls.  The readmission measure, while applied to hospitals, is a cudgel to ensure that health systems create stronger primary care and post-acute systems. How to do that effectively is as yet unclear.

 

Q:  Finally, perhaps you can  add any other points of interest you might want readers to know about?

Auerbach:  HOMERuN will continue to function, and we are looking for opportunities for sites to be our ‘V2’ wave of readmission adjudication and will be developing partnerships to support that work in the coming weeks.  We are doing the usual range of secondary analyses on existing data as well, of course.  The project will be an ongoing work in progress.

 

table 2

Of mention, co-released in the same issue: International Validity of the HOSPITAL Score to Predict 30-Day Potentially Avoidable Hospital Readmissions .  (File under, can we build a better mousetrap?)

Share This Post

Leave A Comment

For security, use of Google's reCAPTCHA service is required which is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

About the Author: Bradley Flansbaum

Bradley Flansbaum, DO, MPH, MHM works for Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA in both the divisions of hospital medicine and population health. He began working as a hospitalist in 1996, at the inception of the hospital medicine movement. He is a founding member of the Society of Hospital Medicine and served as a board member and officer. He speaks nationally in promoting hospital medicine and has presented at many statewide meetings and conferences. He is also actively involved in house staff education. Currently, he serves on the SHM Public Policy Committee and has an interest in payment policy, healthcare market competition, health disparities, cost-effectiveness analysis, and pain and palliative care. He is SHM’s delegate for the AMA House of Delegates. Dr. Flansbaum received his undergraduate degree from Union College in Schenectady, NY and attended medical school at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine. He completed his residency and chief residency in Internal Medicine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York. He received his M.P.H. in Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is a political junky, and loves to cook, stay fit, read non-fiction, listen to many genres of music, and is a resident of Danville, PA.

Categories

Related Posts

By Suchita Shah Sata, MD, SFHM
September 30, 2022 |  0
If you were designing the perfect hospitalist job description, what would be the optimal workload to achieve high productivity? This was the crux of the discussion during September’s JHMChat. The conversation featured Drs. Marisha Burden, Moksha Patel, Mark Kissler, and Elizabeth Harry as well as researcher Angela Keniston, coauthors of “Measuring and driving hospitalist value: […]
By Lanna Felde, MD
November 22, 2021 |  2
Last week’s #JHMChat saw an all-star guest lineup including Drs. Adam Rodman, Zahir Kanjee, Laura McNamara, and Shane Warnock of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center debating the value of the routine daily physical exam – is it worthwhile or a waste of time? This question was recently debated in our Point: Counterpoint series and got […]
December 11, 2020 |  0
I’ve been thinking a lot about endurance recently. For the third time, COVID-19 is surging in the U.S., and this time, it’s not localized to New York or the Sun Belt – it’s everywhere. Healthcare workers exhausted from the first and second waves – and those in smaller Midwestern communities who are just now experiencing […]
Go to Top