Thirty-day All-cause Hospital Readmissions – Racial and Income Disparities and Risk Factors in a Veteransintegrated Healthcare Network

Abstract

Hospital readmission rate has long been one of the most watched measures for hospital quality of care and possesses significant financial implications. On 1 October 2012, CMS started to reduce payments to the hospitals with excessive readmissions. The penalties implemented by CMS have rekindled extensive research activities centred on the fairness of the penalties owing to racial disparities for hospitals serving disadvantaged populations and on the interventions that can reduce readmissions. In this study, we found that no racial and income disparities exist in the Veterans Integrated Healthcare Network Upstate New York, which could have broader policy implications. We explored demographic and socioeconomic risk factors and found that unmarried patients were 19% more likely to be rehospitalised. Given more than half of the inpatients are unmarried, 19% more readmissions merit greater attention from hospital managers and policymakers alike.