Hospital Readmission Reduction Program
Type: Essay
Subject: Issues in Nursing
Subject area: Nursing
Education Level: Masters Program
Length: 1 pages
Referencing style: APA
Preferred English: US English
Spacing Option: Double
Title: US health care policy
Instructions: select an effective current health policy (in us) that focuses on or affects population health. what components of this policy make it effective? conduct research on its history and the factors that influenced its development.
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Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP)
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The health policy under consideration is the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) which was implemented in 2010 under the Persistent Assurance and Reasonable Care Act (ACA). The policy was in an effort to decrease clinic readmissions, lower health care costs, and make positively impact on patient safety and health outcomes. HRRP is stipulated under section 3025 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The law requires allows the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to reduce financial assistance to Inpatient Prospective Payment System hospitals which register excessively high number of readmissions. There are six main conditions that are evaluated under the program which include acute myocardial infarction, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failure, pneumonia, coronary artery bypass graft surgery and elective primary total hip arthroplasty and/or total knee arthroplasty. HRRP is also strengthened by the 21st Century Cures Act which allows Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to determine the hospital’s performance and compare its performance with similar hospitals.
The Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) was established after numerous hospitals in the United States registered increasing number of readmission rates which adversely affected the quality of care offered to patients. For example, Wier et al. (2011) reported that in 2008, 30-day readmission rates were 24.1 among non-elderly Medicare patients and 19 percent for the Medicare patients. HRRP was therefore introduced to compel hospitals to implement health measures to reduce readmission rates including providing patient-centered care and reducing medication errors.
Gai and Pachamanova (2019) conducted a research to determine whether HRRP has impacted on the reduction of readmission rates. Data for the research was obtained from Nationwide Readmission Database (NRD) between 2010 and 2014. The research showed that the adoption of HRRP had resulted to a statistically significant reduction in readmission rates. In particular, readmission rates among vulnerable populations and low-income patients drastically reduced after the adoption of the policies which. The success of the policy in reducing readmission rates especially for the low-income earners and high-risk patients make the policy effective.
References
Gai, Y., & Pachamanova, D. (2019). Impact of the Medicare hospital readmissions reduction program on vulnerable populations. BMC health services research, 19(1), 1-15.
Wier, L. M., Barrett, M., Steiner, C., & Jiang, H. J. (2011). all-cause readmissions by payer and age, 2008: statistical brief# 115.
