We already mentioned President Obama touching on primary care at his health shindig today. Another theme that caught our attention was hospital readmissions. He said: Right now hospitals, they are not penalized if there are constant readmission rates from patients that have gone through the hospital. If you go to a — if you go to a car company or a auto shop, if you say, “Can I have my car repaired?”, you get your car repaired — if two weeks later it’s broken down again, if you take it back, hopefully they’re not going to charge you again for repairing the car. You want them to do it right the first time. And too often we’re not seeing the best practices in some of these hospitals to prevent people from being readmitted. That costs a lot of money. So those are the kinds of changes we’re talking about. Hospitals get paid by Medicare every time they admit a patient, which means there’s no incentive for them to keep patients out of the

hospital once they’ve been discharged. The big health care bills coming out of Congress this year aim to change that, by providing lower Medicare payments for hospitals with high risk-adjusted readmission rates. But as the WSJ recently reported , some hospitals that have already begun working on lowering their readmission rates are finding that it’s a tough proposition. In particular, it’s not just a matter of giving good care when the patient is in the hospital — of fixing the car correctly, to use Obama’s analogy. Rather, in order to lower readmission rates, hospitals find they must work closely with patients outside of the hospital, to encourage them to to take proper care of themselves and help them get follow-up care. It would be as if, a few days after you got the car out of the shop, the mechanic dropped by your house to check the oil and make sure you weren’t still riding the clutch. Image: iStockphoto

Originally posted here:
Obama Sees Savings In Hospital Readmission Payments