Search results for "Readmission rates"

Hospital readmission rates: signal of failure or success?

2013

AbstractHospital readmission rates are increasingly used as signals of hospital performance and a basis for hospital reimbursement. However, their interpretation may be complicated by differential patient survival rates. If patient characteristics are not perfectly observable and hospitals differ in their mortality rates, then hospitals with low mortality rates are likely to have a larger share of un-observably sicker patients at risk of a readmission. Their performance on readmissions will then be underestimated. We examine hospitals’ performance relaxing the assumption of independence between mortality and readmissions implicitly adopted in many empirical applications. We use data from th…