Deans' stroke musings: Medicare hits half of US hospitals with readmission penalties

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Medicare hits half of US hospitals with readmission penalties

In stroke it should be if the stroke patient dies within 30 days from stroke effects then Medicare should not pay anything. That might be the only way to actually get stroke hospitals to solve all the problems in stroke. Nothing else seems to get their heads out of their asses.
http://go.questexweb.com/dc/Pbv9O4c1H4PY1a6n8S1hix6lNLwPrsjOK402GYoLSpGGjO-ndHR6qs7jJqm43woU88IoXIv-OKvNvkYcqrWkaf6owfC3mc9cgqDoVeUrj2B54-5TriGuiemiCkwvciljQ437CR_G_VNZx-rp_lPP-DU3tOjIpqiNNasmPdq7wn-h47TeMGiQE85IjVhr02ttbdTk-P_903nOG_V_XG8gdg==/wQ2Fu2eMQ00c0Ran00G1v05

More than half of U.S. hospitals will be dinged for excessive 30-day readmission rates, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.
Medicare will withhold more than half a billion payments this year, according to the analysis of figures released Tuesday, with the penalties set to take effect with the new fiscal year in October. More than 2,500 hospitals will receive penalties, a figure in line with last year’s report. The average penalty will increase by a fifth, KHN reported.
The penalties will mean hospitals will lose more than $520 million in payments--an increase of more than $100 million from last year due to changes in how Medicare measures readmissions, according to the KHN analysis. For example, this year it considered rates for coronary artery bypass graft surgery in addition to heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia, chronic lung disease, and hip and knee replacements.
KHN’s analysis also found:

The average penalty is 0.73 percent per patient stay, the highest ever
Forty-nine hospitals will receive the maximum cut of 3 percent
More than 1,600 hospitals have been penalized every year since the program began in 2012

Medicare’s readmission penalties are controversial. Leading organizations like the American Hospital Association have argued that there are some factors beyond a hospital’s control, like a patients' socioeconomic situation, which may lead a person to return to the hospital.
The fear of penalties, though, has pushed hospitals to take action to reduce their readmission rates. Though about half of eligible hospitals will receive penalties this year, in 2012 and 2013, the program’s first two years, about two-thirds were slapped with penalties. The number of readmission penalties hit a record high in 2014.
- read the KHN analysis