New tool targets readmission rate in heart failure patients
Researchers at the Intermountain Heart Institute at the Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah, unveiled a tool designed to eliminate 30-day hospital readmissions for heart failure patients at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session in San Francisco on March 9.
Known as IMRS-HF, the tool in part seeks to prevent reimbursement penalties under the Affordable Care Act for hospitals with heart attack or heart failure patients readmitted within 30 days.
The IMRS-HF tool helps researchers better evaluate a patient’s condition when discharged, and incorporates a statistical model that produces a risk score that informs physicians of the likelihood of his or her return to the hospital. Its development culminated from an examination of more than 6,000 EMRs of discharged heart failure patients from Intermountain Healthcare hospitals between 1999 and 2011, according to an announcement on the tool.
The IMRS-HF tool was validated using 459 patients hospitalized between April 2011 and October 2012.
The tool also uses some laboratory components from the complete blood count and basic metabolic panel, but also adds additional factors such as hospital length of stay and patient co-morbidities, according to the Intermountain Heart Institute announcement.