Study: Patient readmissions, deaths not linked.

Reuters (2/13, Seaman) reports that a new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that the number of patients readmitted to hospitals is not linked to the number of patients that die at those same hospitals; specifically, hospitals can reduce their readmission rate while keeping patient mortality low. The researchers tracked heart attack patients, pneumonia patients, and heart failure patients, which CMS tracks to determine hospital quality, over the course of three years. They found no relationship between the number of patients that died and the number of patients that were readmitted. The research is particularly relevant in light of CMS using the number of readmitted patients and deceased patients to determine hospital quality; some healthcare providers had expressed concern that reducing one number would increase the other.

        Kaiser Health News (2/12, Rau) reported, Dr. Harlan Krumholz of Yale University School of Medicine, the lead author of the study, said, "I feel we've dispelled the notion that your performance in mortality will dictate your performance in readmission...This result says they appear to be measuring different things, they're not strongly related to each other and you can clearly do well on both."

        HealthDay (2/13, Gordon) reports, "After reviewing data on almost 3 million hospital admissions for people on Medicare who'd had a heart attack, pneumonia or heart failure, Yale University researchers found that 30-day death rates weren't strongly associated with a hospital's performance on 30-day readmission rates." In a previous Yale study, "researchers found that about one in five people discharged from the hospital end up readmitted."

        MedPage Today (2/13, Gever) reports that "The analysis also found that hospital factors such as teaching and ownership status did not affect the relationships between readmissions and mortality in MI and pneumonia at all, and not very much for heart failure." The researchers wrote that the findings "should allay concerns that institutions with good performance on risk-standardized mortality rates will necessarily be identified as poor performers on their risk-standardized readmission rates."

        Modern Healthcare (2/13, McKinney, Subscription Publication, 71K) and Heartwire (2/13, O'Riordan) report on the story as well.