Lynne: Initial CMS Evaluations of Readmissions Have Serious Flaws

Joanne Lynn M.D., Director of the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness at Altarum Institute, wields a scalpel and a battle axe in her recent criticism of initial CMS evaluations of readmissions. The lede:The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has quietly put out two evaluations of the readmissions work– and both documents are remarkable for their failure to evaluate the programs fairly or to provide insights as to what works in what circumstances.Excerpts:The readmissions/discharges metric that CMS and its evaluators use for categorizing success or failure is seriously flawed.  There is no reason why a 20% reduction in the now thoroughly discredited readmissions/discharges ratio is the best target. A more informative target would clearly focus on providing a reliable, well-characterized set of services that work to the advantage of patients and families and that also reduces total costs. Much of the problem with the measures probably has roots in national leadership still conceptualizing the transitions work as being dominantly the responsibility of hospitals and their staffs, while people living with serious chronic conditions need a more comprehensive, community-anchored, population-based approach. Even so, responsible evaluation would require, at the very least, a close examination of actual numerators and denominators in order to interpret the simplistic and routinely misleading ratio.  The most important issue is whether ...
Source: Running a hospital - Category: Health Managers Source Type: blogs