Hospitals waste up to $3.8M annually on readmissions: study

A typical hospital with 200 to 300 beds wastes up to $3.8 million a year, or 9.6 percent of its total budget, on readmissions of patients who shouldn't have had to come back, says Premier, a healthcare company that advises hospitals on improving efficiency and safety. The company analyzed the records of 5.8 million incidents in which a patient went back to a hospital to be re-treated and found they added $8.7 billion a year, or 15.7 percent, to the cost of caring for those people. Cutting back on these readmissions would be good news for patients. Even if the hospital has to eat the costs of additional treatments, patients are still subject to the risks of the procedures they undergo and the normal danger of contracting an infection while in the hospital.