Boomerang Hospital Admissions and Medicare

Kaiser Health News recently reported on efforts by CMS to crack down on what KHN calls “boomerang” hospital admissions. Medicare Takes Aim At Boomerang Hospitalizations Of Nursing Home Patients focuses on the situation where nursing home residents have multiple hospitalizations.

With hospitals pushing patients out the door earlier, nursing homes are deluged with increasingly frail patients. But many homes, with their sometimes-skeletal medical staffing, often fail to handle post-hospital complications — or create new problems by not heeding or receiving accurate hospital and physician instructions.

Patients, caught in the middle, may suffer. One in 5 Medicare patients sent from the hospital to a nursing home boomerang back within 30 days, often for potentially preventable conditions such as dehydration, infections and medication errors, federal records show. Such rehospitalizations occur 27 percent more frequently than for the Medicare population at large.

One solution implemented by CMS, the story explains, has been to penalize hospitals when the resident is readmitted, “in an attempt to curtail premature discharges and to encourage hospitals to refer patients to nursing homes with good track records.”  In the next few months, CMS will now initiate a program with incentives for nursing homes: “giving nursing homes bonuses or penalties based on their Medicare rehospitalization rates. The goal is to accelerate early signs of progress: The rate of potentially avoidable readmissions dropped to 10.8 percent in 2016 from 12.4 percent in 2011, according to Congress’ Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that a resident will never be hospitalized but hopefully this will make the process and the care better for residents.  The article looks at reasons for the frequent admission problems, noting the causes include ineffective communication between the nursing home and the treating doctors.

This issue is a common one.

Out of the nation’s 15,630 nursing homes, one-fifth send 25 percent or more of their patients back to the hospital, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of data on Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare website. On the other end of the spectrum, the fifth of homes with the lowest readmission rates return fewer than 17 percent of residents to the hospital.

Stay tuned.