Readmission Rates – The Health Care Blog

The 30-day Readmission Rate: Not a Quality Measure but an Accountability Measure

Feb 14, 2013• 3

By Ashish Jha, MD

Should we hold hospitals accountable for what happens after a patient leaves the hospitals’ doors? A year ago, I thought the answer was no. A hospital’s job was to take care of sick patients, make them better and send them on their way. With more thought and consideration, I have come to conclude that I was probably wrong. It may be perfectly reasonable to hold hospitals accountable for care beyond their walls, but we should be clear why we’re doing it. Readmissions are not a good quality measure – but they may be a very good way to change the notion of accountability within the healthcare delivery system.

The debate around the readmissions measure has come to the forefront because of the CMS Hospital Readmission Reduction Program, which penalizes hospitals for “greater than expected” readmission rates. It has raised the question — does a hospital’s 30-day readmission rate measure the “quality of care” it provides? Over the last three years, the evidence has come in, and to my read, it is unequivocal. By most standards, the readmissions metric fails as a quality measure.

Why do I say that readmissions are a poor measure of hospital quality? First, we have to begin by thinking about what makes a good quality measure. Quality is about the essence of the thing being produced – a good or a service. The job of a car is to get you from place A to place B and a high-quality car may be one that does the job reliably, safely, or maybe even comfortably. The job of a restaurant is to provide a meal that you don’t have to cook — and a high quality restaurant may provide food that is fresh, tasty, or with an attention to service that you enjoy. What is the job of a hospital? When you get sick and require hospital services, a high-quality hospital should give you the right treatments, attend to your needs while you’re there, and make sure nothing bad (i.e. a new nosocomial infection) happens along the way. That’s how we measure hospital quality.

Quality measures for healthcare come in three flavors – structural measures (do you have enough intensivists manning your ICU?), processes measures (did you give the heart attack patient his or her aspirin?) and outcomes measures (did the pneumonia patient die?). The elemental part of both structural measures and process measures is that they have to be tied to an outcome we care about. If having more intensivists in the ICU does not lead to lower ICU mortality (or lower complication rates), we wouldn’t think it’s a particularly good quality measure. We know that giving aspirin to heart attack patients lowers their chances of dying by 25%. We have multiple randomized trials. We don’t need much more evidence. Hospitals that have the right structures in place and reliably deliver the right treatments can reasonably be called high-quality hospitals.

Profits, Quality, and U.S. Hospitals

Aug 20, 2012• 8

By Ashish Jha, MD

The recent articles in the New York Times about the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) have once again raised important questions about the role of for-profit hospitals in the U.S. healthcare system. For-profits make up about 20% of all hospitals and many of them are part of large chains (such as HCA). Critics of for-profit hospitals have argued that these institutions sacrifice good patient care in their search for better financial returns. Supporters argue that there is little evidence that their behavior differs substantially from non-profit institutions or that their care is meaningfully worse.

To me, this is essentially an empirical question. Yet, I read the through the articles, I was struck by the dearth of data provided on the quality of care at these hospitals. Based on the comments that followed the stories, it was clear that many readers came away thinking that these hospitals had sacrificed quality in order to maximize profits. Here, I thought an ounce of evidence might be helpful.

Measuring quality:

There is no perfect way to measure the quality of a hospital. However, the science of quality measurement has made huge progress over the past decade. There is increasing consensus around a set of metrics, many of which are now publicly reported by the government and even are part of pay-for-performance schemes. While one can criticize every one of these metrics as imperfect, taken together, they paint a relatively good, broad picture of the quality of care in an institution. We focused on five metrics with widespread acceptance: