By REED ABELSON
Published: April 1, 2009
The nation spends billions of dollars a year on patients’ return visits to the hospital — many of which are readmissions that could be prevented with better follow-up care, according to a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
As many as a fifth of all Medicare patients are readmitted within a month of being discharged, according to the study, and a third are rehospitalized within 90 days.
Half the patients who returned to the hospital within 30 days of undergoing treatment other than surgery apparently did not see a doctor before they went back.
The high rate of hospital readmissions is “one of the fruits of an increasingly fragmented health care system,” said Dr. Stephen F. Jencks, a former Medicare official who is an author of the study, which analyzed Medicare claims information for 2003 and 2004. He estimated that the cost of the unplanned return trips was $17 billion in 2004 alone.
Policy analysts say that while high return rates have long been a problem, controlling those costs is increasingly urgent.....
Many Medicare Patients Rehospitalized, Study Finds - NYTimes.com
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