CMS readmission penalties of hospitals made a major effect, says Study

Highlights:
​30-days readmission rates for myocardial infarction, heart failure and pneumonia "reduced more rapidly than before the law's passage," since after the passage of the Medicare Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), in accordance to a recent study released in Annals of Internal Medicine.

CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) under HRRP started decreasing Medicare payments for inpatient prospective payments for eligible hospitals with excessive readmissions in 2012.
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The study’s authors said, “Our key findings recommend that passage of the law was followed by widespread reductions in readmission rates, even with control for pre-law trends, and that this impact was most concentrated among the lowest-performing hospitals”.

Explanation:
The authors noted, "Improvement was most marked for hospitals with the lowest pre-law performance”.
More than half of all United States hospitals (2,497) will be punished deployed on their rehospitalization rates in fiscal year 2017 for sufferers who were discharged from the month of July 2012 through June 2015, Kaiser Health News (KHN) estimated in August. ​
The study’s authors noted their research is restricted by the inability to distinguish improvements caused by "magnitude of the penalty" or varying health improvements spread across several distinctive patient populations.
The new research still echoes data shared by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in September where the District of Columbia and forty-nine states decreased avoidable hospital readmission rates between the time period of 2010 and 2015. In accordance to the agency, the time federal efforts to deal readmission rates like the ACA's HRRP are working as Medicare patients avoided an estimated 565,000 readmissions since the year of 2010. 
Although, the penalties of HRRP mentioned a shared concern among hospitals that have more low-income sufferers in contrast to others as these sufferers "can have more trouble recuperating, sometimes because they cannot afford their medications or lack social support to follow the instructions of physician, such as decreasing the amount of salt that heart failure patients consume," as pointed out by Kaiser Health News (KHN).