Hospital Readmissions: A Case Study

The main point of the Podcast is about reducing the costly, unnecessary hospital readmissions. Costantino, Frey, Hall, & Painter (2013) claim that many hospital readmissions are avoidable and consist of poor care quality and inadequate transition care. To address this problem, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) established The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, which fines hospitals with excess 30-day readmissions through a Medicare reimbursement rate cut for higher readmission rates for patients with principal diagnosis of pneumonia, heart attack, or congestive heart failure (Costantino, Frey, Hall, & Painter, p. 310, 2013). The Podcast explain that the reduction of the unnecessary hospital readmissions can be achieved by giving clear discharge instructions to patients and introducing a home health service that monitors patients after discharge. This service can be provided by a transmission system, a call line and nurses who visit patients at their home to investigate possible problems by checking patients’ vital signs, monitoring their medications, pain and pain management, and providing patients with education. Moreover, Mansukhani, Bridgeman, Candelario, and Eckert (2015) found that, follow-up telephone call to patients are able to immediately address the patient’s needs, resolve problems and assess proper self-health management (Mansukhani, …show more content…
This system enables patients to learn how to be more independents by self-managing their health monitoring their vital signs and transmitting them to the healthcare facility, where vital signs are monitored by nurses and physicians while patients wait for their follow-up appointments with their healthcare providers. As Winborn, Alencherril, & Pagán (2014) highlights, readmission penalties were designed to incentivize hospitals to improve the quality of patient care (Winborn, Alencherril, & Pagán, p. 5,