Hospitals Begin Reporting PCI Readmission Rates

As part of a new pilot program, more than 300 US hospitals have begun to voluntarily report 30-day all-cause risk standardized readmission rates after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).

The program is part of a collaboration among the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the Yale New Haven Health Services Corp. Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (YNHHSC-CORE), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The pilot was launched in early 2013 after ACC, YNHHSC-CORE, and CMS worked together to develop the PCI readmission measure and gain the endorsement of the National Quality Forum. Its methodology is consistent with methods currently used to record unplanned readmissions in the CMS report for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia. However, the PCI readmission measure differs in that it utilizes clinical registry data to assess the health of each hospital’s patient population for risk adjustment.

According to the ACC’s patient information website, that measure takes into account how sick patients were before they were admitted to the hospital for their PCI procedure, as well as the differences in readmisison rates that may be due to chance through risk adjustment, in order to produce a risk-standardized PCI readmission rate for each hospital.

The hospitals will be publicly reporting their results on CMS’s Hospital Compare website.