Readmission rates show whether patients who enter a hospital for a particular condition are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days after an initial discharge. Data on 30-day readmission rates are publicly available online from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid.
Because some hospitals, such as academic medical centers like Rush, tend to take care of significantly sicker patients and more complicated cases, the rate of readmissions is adjusted to take into account how sick patients were before being admitted to the hospital. This rate is then referred to as "risk adjusted."
For a small number of vulnerable patients, hospital readmission is often the right thing to do. Our goal isn't to stop all readmissions, just unnecessary ones.
Here is Rush's data on readmissions within 30 days after an initial discharge from the hospital for patients who experienced COPD or pneumonia. All numbers are based on the most recent data available from CMS.
