Nationwide, about one in four Medicare patients hospitalized for heart failure is readmitted within a month of being discharged. The feds started reporting the figures for individual hospitals online earlier this year, and a team helped figure out how to adjust the data to account for factors like varying patient populations, in an effort to allow fair comparisons between hospitals. Now the House bill and the Senate Finance bill both call for docking Medicare payments to hospitals with high risk-adjusted readmission rates.
