Including socioeconomic status reduces readmission penalties to safety-net hospitals.

Objective: Medicare's Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) financially penalizes "excessive" postoperative readmissions. Concerned with creating a double standard for institutions treating a high percentage of economically vulnerable patients, Medicare elected to exclude socioeconomic status (SES) from its risk-adjustment model. However, recent evidence suggests that safety-net hospitals (SNHs) caring for many low-SES patients are disproportionately penalized under the HRRP.

Validating administratively derived frailty scores for use in Veterans Health Administration emergency departments.

Objectives: Frailty is a clinical syndrome characterized by decreased physiologic reserve that diminishes the ability to respond to stressors such as acute illness. Veterans Health Administration (VA) emergency departments (ED) are the primary venue of care for Veterans with acute illness and represent key sites for frailty recognition. As questionnaire-based frailty instruments can be cumbersome to implement in the ED, we examined two administratively derived frailty scores for use among VA ED patients.

Indication for Lower Extremity Revascularization and Hospital Profiling of Readmissions.

Background: Surgical readmissions are common, costly, and the focus of national quality improvement efforts. Given the relatively high readmission rates among vascular patients, pay-for-performance initiatives such as Medicare's Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) have targeted vascular surgery for increased scrutiny in the near future. Yet, the extent to which institutional case mix influences hospital profiling remains unexplored.

Time-to-readmission and Mortality After High-risk Surgery.

Objectives: To determine if mortality varies by time-to-readmission (TTR).

Background: Although readmissions reduction is a national health care priority, little progress has been made toward understanding why only some readmissions lead to adverse outcomes.

Methods: In this retrospective cross-sectional cohort analysis, we used 2005-2009 Medicare data on beneficiaries undergoing colectomy, lung resection, or coronary artery bypass grafting (n = 1,033,255) to created 5 TTR groups: no 30-day readmission (n = 897,510), less than 6 days (n = 44,361), 6 to 10 days (n = 31,018), 11 to 15 days (n = 20,797), 16 to 20 days (n = 15,483), or more than 21 days (n = 24,086).