Dive Brief:
- The Agency for Healthcare in Research and Quality (AHRQ) has launched the National Readmissions Database (NRD) to analyze national hospital readmission rates. It is the first all-payer nationwide database that supports tracking hospital readmissions.
- The NRD is part of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), a group of several related databases that include information from administrative billing data.
- NRD compiles information from HCUP State Inpatient Databases (SID) which can be used to estimate national readmission rates for all payers and the uninsured.
Dive Insight:
The 2013 NRD was compiled from 21 states with verified patient linkage numbers in the SID which can be used to track the patient across hospitals within a state.
Some key features of the 2013 NRD include a large sample size to provide sufficient data for analysis; discharge data from 21 states, representing 49.1% of all U.S. hospitalizations; flexible analyses of readmissions for all payer types and the uninsured; and various outcomes of interest. Criteria to determine the relationship between multiple hospital admissions for an individual patient is left to the analyst and the database is designed only to support national readmission analyses, not regional, state, or hospital-specific analyses.
There is a new HCUP Statistical Brief that looks at trends in hospital readmissions for four conditions: congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart attack, and pneumonia. In 2013, there were 500,000 readmissions for a total of $6.8 billion in aggregate hospital costs, according to the brief.