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Readmission, revisit rates poor indicators of hospital care quality
Using readmission and revisit rates for common pediatric condition are limited in usefulness as quality indicators of pediatric hospital care, according to recent study findings published in Pediatrics.
“As a national way of assessing and tracking hospital quality for comparative purposes, pediatric readmissions and revisits, at least for specific diagnoses, are not useful to families trying to find a good hospital, not to the hospitals trying to improve their pediatric care,” Naomi Bardach, MD, of the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, said in a press release. “Measuring and reporting individual hospital readmission rates publicly for comparative purposes would waste limited hospital and health care resources.”
Naomi Bardach
The retrospective analysis included information from the State Inpatient and Emergency Department Databases from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project for children aged 1 to 20 years visiting the hospital for asthma, dehydration, pneumonia, appendicitis, skin infections, mood disorders and epilepsy.
Researchers found that 30-day readmission rates were less than 10% for all conditions and 30-day revisit rates ranged from 6.2% for appendicitis to 11% for mood disorders.
“Quality measures that are publicly reported should be useful for identifying high and low performing hospitals so that we can identify best practices and improve quality of care,” Bardach told Infectious Diseases in Children. “Readmission and revisit rates for common childhood diseases do not identify high and low performing hospitals and so should not be used as publicly reported measures.”
Disclosure: The study was funded in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Center for Research Resources, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and NIH.
Naomi Bardach, MD, can be reached at bardachn@peds.ucsf.edu.
