To The Editor: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) view readmission for any reason after an index hospitalization for heart failure as a sign of poor quality of care. “From the patient perspective, readmission from any cause is an adverse event.”1 Little consideration has been given, however, to a potential association between readmissions and mortality, an outcome that is of p...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of social deprivation and ethnicity on inpatient admissions due to diabetes in England. DESIGN Facility-based cross-sectional analysis. SETTING National Health Service (NHS) trusts in England reporting inpatient admissions with better than 80% data reporting quality from 2010-2011 (355 facilities). PARTICIPANTS Non-obstetric patients over 16 years old i...

Heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalization among adults 65 years of age in the United States. Annually, 1 million patients are hospitalized with a primary diagnosis of heart failure, accounting for a total Medicare expenditure exceeding $17 billion.1 Despite dramatic improvement in outcomes with medical therapy,2,3 admission rates following heart failure hospitalization remain high,4...

BACKGROUND The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) directed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to implement a hospital readmissions reduction program that reduces payments to hospitals for excess readmissions that began in October 2012. As such, hospitals across the country have been trying to identify and implement successful strategies for reducing hospitalizations. ...

Background. Hospitalization accounts for 70% of heart failure (HF) costs; readmission rates at 30 days are 24% and rise to 50% by 90 days. Agencies anticipate that telehomecare will provide the close monitoring necessary to prevent HF readmissions. Methods and Results. Randomized controlled trial to compare a telehomecare intervention for patients 55 and older following hospital discharge for H...

BACKGROUND Multidisciplinary heart failure (HF) clinics are efficacious in clinical trials. Our objectives were to compare real-world outcomes of patients with HF treated in HF clinics versus usual therapy and identify HF clinic features associated with improved outcomes. METHODS AND RESULTS The service components at all HF clinics in Ontario, Canada, were quantified using a validated instrum...