Readmissions: An Initiative to Improve Care and Lower the Cost of Healthcare

Hughes (2008) quoting from the , the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality handbook stated that “many view quality health care as the overarching umbrella under which patient safety resides”. Friedman, Encinosa, Jiang & Mutter (2009) found that “safety events that result in hospital readmissions lead to hefty a financial burden on the institution”. In addition they believe that if more attention is given to address and “ assess the full extra cost of safety events and the factors influencing the rate of safety events, that strategies could be developed for health plans to improve incentives for safety” Friedman, Encinosa, Jiang & Mutter (2009). The Institute of Medicine (IOM) considers patient safety “indistinguishable from the delivery of quality health care.” (Hughes, 2008) believes that “Moving toward and securing a culture of safety throughout health care will, by definition, acknowledge the influence of human factors in all clinicians and the impact that the human- system interface , system factors and technology will have, in institutionalizing processes which will make near errors and errors very rare” (Hughes, 2008)

The proposed project would be to look specifically at readmissions- and initiative to improve care and lower the cost of healthcare (James & Hall 2013). “Readmission refers to a patient's being admitted to the hospital within a certain time period from the initial admission (James & Hall 2013). Readmission following an acute care hospitalization is a costly and often preventable event and is not only disruptive to patients and caregivers, but puts patients at additional risk of hospital-acquired infections and complications (Horwitz, L., Partovian, C., Lin, Z., Herrin, J., Grady, J., Conover,...

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Friedman B1, Encinosa W, Jiang HJ, Mutter R. (2009). Do patient safety events increase readmissions? Med Care. May;47(5):583-90. doi: 10.1097/MLR.0b013e31819434da.