Factors like the level of poverty in a neighborhood, living alone, and age affect a patient’s chances of being readmitted to a hospital after discharge, even after possible variations in quality of care in the hospital have been taken into account.
Those are the conclusions of a new study by Henry Ford Health System researchers who found links between readmission rates and social factors such as patients’ marital status and neighborhood poverty, suggesting that readmissions are not just an issue of hospital quality.
The study appears in the May issue of Health Affairs.
“The use of readmission rate as a basis for financial penalties to hospitals assumes that readmissions are a result of poor-quality care,†says Jianhui Hu, a research associate at the Henry Ford’s Center for Health Policy and Health Services Research. “Our team found that there is much more to it than that.
“For example, patients living in a high-poverty neighborhood were 24 percent more likely than others to be readmitted. While the pathway from poverty to readmission risks is complicated and can be all different for different patients, things that happened after they were discharged from the hospital, at home or in the community, may put some patients in higher readmission risks.â€
The study noted that the proper role of readmission data as a measure of hospital quality is under active debate in the health care policy arena. At issue is a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACD) that established the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program.
Under that program, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began to reduce payments to hospitals with “excess†30-day readmissions.
Earlier studies suggested that readmissions are a product of a complex set of factors, only one of which is hospital quality of care. Many of those studies used data collected from hundreds of hospitals nationwide, where it is often hard to separate effects of variables like poverty from effects of variations in the quality of care provided by hospitals serving low-income patients.
“Few of them identified and controlled for various hospital-specific factors that might be related to readmission, such as staffing, organizational structure, discharge-planning protocols and the hospital’s role in an integrated system of care,†Hu explains.
So her team set out to examine the issue using data from a single urban institution – Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit – to determine the effects of patients’ socioeconomic status under a single, fixed organizational and staffing structure and standard care protocols for patients of all types.
Drawing on the hospital’s data bank, they identified all Medicare fee-for-service patients age 65 and older who were discharged from the hospital during 2010.
After excluding patients who died in the hospital, were discharged against medical advice or were hospitalized for certain special treatments, the researchers finalized a study group of 4,646 unique patients.
Using in-house data to determine each patient’s age, sex, race, marital status, street address and diagnosis, the researchers mapped patients’ addresses to census data to determine their neighborhood socioeconomic factors, including percentage of families with incomes below the federal poverty level, median household income and percentage of the population older than 25 without a high school diploma.
Their mean age was 77, and black patients made up the majority of the study group. On average, patients lived in neighborhoods where nearly 30 percent of people age 25 and older lacked a high school diploma, 17 percent of households had incomes below poverty level and the median household income was about $38,000.