Home Health & Hospice Week

Accountability is the key to success with this important outcome. You can kiss better rehospitalization outcomes good-bye unless you make prevention efforts a major priority from the top down. Problem: Nearly 20 percent of Medicare patients discharged from a hospital are readmitted within 30 days. Home care patients overall have a 27 percent rate of rehospitalization, which means 891,000 home care patients are hospitalized every year, said Eileen Freitag of Fazzi and Associates in Northampton Mass., during a webinar addressing the new Delta study to reduce avoidable hospitalizations. All those rehospitalizations for home care patients rack up $6.4 billion in costs annually. Opportunity: If the home care industry can reduce unplanned hospitalizations, "we can have a significant impact on healthcare financing in this country," Freitag said. It's also an opportunity for agencies to have a positive impact on quality and quality scores, as well as a benefit to patients and [...]