Dozens of Metro Atlanta Hospitals Will Pay Penalties for Readmission Rates
More than 2,000 hospitals all across the US will soon pay a penalty based on the number of Medicare patients they re-admit.
New data from Kaiser Health News show that includes some 40 metro Atlanta hospitals.
The penalty goes into effect in October as part of the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA), designed to save some of the $17.5 billion dollars spent each year on Medicare readmissions.
Vi Naylor, executive vice president of the Georgia Hospital Association, says holding hospitals accountable for outcomes is a good thing.
But not based on readmission rates.
“We prefer that these measures that these kinds of penalties are based on – that they be valid and reliable,” she said.
The penalties, which cap at 1% of a hospital’s overall Medicare reimbursement, don’t take into effect why a patient comes back. And that concerns people on both sides of the ACA debate.
“Not all readmissions are bad,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, who teaches health policy at Harvard.
He said data show hospitals with high readmission rates often have low mortality rates, and that how many patients a hospital keeps alive is better at assessing quality than just looking at blanket readmissions.
“The problem is very, very complex,” Jha said. “And it’s so much more about how sick somebody is, what kind of resources they have at home. And fixing those is going to take many, many years.”
Jha said the penalties will hit hardest so-called “safety net” hospitals, because those take in more poor and minority patients who account for large numbers of readmissions.
In Atlanta, that includes Grady Memorial. Although its penalty—just one tenth of one percent–is among the lowest in all of Georgia.
Even among hospital groups, there are wide discrepancies. Emory University Hospital faces no penalty, while Emory Adventist Hospital in Smyrna is close to the max of 1%.
Click Here to view a complete list of metro Atlanta hospitals and how they rank.
(This report is part of an ongoing partnership between WABE, NPR and Kaiser Health News. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)
Top Stories
