Readmission penalties reduced for safety-net hospitals

Hundreds of hospitals will see penalties on patient readmissions ease up after Congress instructed Medicare to change its policy, NPR reported.

Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare punishes hospitals when too many patients end up back in their care within 30 days after a discharge. Over the next 12 months, these penalties will add up to a $566 million loss to the hospital industry, NPR reported.

However, safety-net hospitals that serve lower-income patients tend to have higher rates of readmissions, through no fault of the institutions. Instead of measuring hospitals’ performances against each other, CMS will assign hospitals to five peer groups of facilities “with similar proportions of low-income patients,” NPR reported.

Evaluating readmission rates against different benchmarks could alleviate some unfair penalties.

See the full story below: