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Preventing hospital readmissions presents an opportunity to improve healthcare quality and lower costs. Although the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have launched a national effort to report hospital performance on discharge planning, we know little about whether discharge planning translates to fewer bounce-back admissions.
Using congestive heart failure (CHF) as a benchmark, researchers accessed the CMS Hospital Quality Alliance database for information on CHF patients who were discharged from U.S. hospitals during 2007. Hospital performance was determined by:
Chart-based discharge measure: whether CHF patients received adequate discharge instructions (composite of activity level and diet instructions, discharge medications…