The panel agreed that while readmissions measures are valuable for improving quality of care, the current three-condition, 30-day metric leaves much to be desired in terms of incorporating a holistic picture of factors contributing to hospital readmissions.
More successful measures would be directly relevant to continuous patient and community wellness and prevention, would incorporate improvement in addition to accountability and would hold organizations accountable for readmissions while considering patient population demographics.
According to the panel, such a relevant suite of measures would balance mortality, length of stay, socioeconomic information, admissions and readmissions and might include measures such as days between hospital encounters, days alive at home and community capacity to not hospitalize.
Additional panel concerns included changing the penalty system for hospitals, operating well within the slow fee-for-service phase-out, healthcare organization improvement capacity and potential for innovation among providers.
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