Dr. Howard Smith Oncall

Campaigns by Medicare to reduce patient readmissions to a hospital within a month following discharge, the so-called Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, is associated with more patient deaths from heart failure and pneumonia rather than improvement in care quality.  This is the conclusion of a study of some 8 million hospitalizations over a decade beginning in 2005 was completed and recently published by Harvard cardiologists at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Mass. General Hospital.   They compared post-hospital mortality statistics before and after announcement and implementation of new financial penalties for hospitals to discourage readmission within a month after discharge.  Their findings suggested that this penny pinching resulted in some 8,000 deaths from heart failure and some 12,000 deaths from pneumonia that could have possibly been avoided.   In addition, many sick persons who did return to the hospital were not formally readmitted as inpatients as their condition demanded, but they