Study: Most hospitals received penalties for excess readmissions

Editor's Note

More than half of hospitals were penalized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in all five years of the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) initiated by the Affordable Care Act, this study finds.

Among the study findings:

• Penalties doubled since the beginning of the program, from 0.29% in 2013 to 0.6% in 2017.
• Penalties were greater in hospitals that were urban, major teaching, large, for-profit, and that treated large numbers of Medicare or socioeconomically disadvantaged patients.
• Hospitals treating more medically complex Medicare patients had a lower penalty burden, surprisingly, than those treating fewer of those patients.
• Hospitals with high baseline penalties in the first year continued to receive significantly higher penalties in subsequent years.

For many hospitals, HRRP leads to persistent penalization and limited capacity to reduce the penalty burden, the authors say.

1Michael P. Thompson (mthompson{at}uthsc.edu ) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, in Memphis. 2Teresa M. Waters is professor and chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Tennessee Health Science Center. 3Cameron M.