FL will post preventable readmissions on website

In their own unusual take on transparency, Florida officials have decided to post data on potentially preventable hospital readmissions on the Web. The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration will post the data on its consumer-facing Web site, FloridaHealthFinder.gov. The data is intended not only to aid officials in tracking the rate of such relapses, but also to help hospital administrators discover when a patient is discharged from one facility and promptly readmitted to a different one. The data comes from admissions during the 12 months prior to March 31, 2007. It looks at 54 conditions and procedures for the 60,707 readmissions during that period. The readmissions were a subset of 877,228 total cases, according to the agency.

This move is particularly interesting given that state officials elsewhere have focused almost entirely on events that occur during a single hospitalization. It will be interesting to see whether other states track this type of data now that Florida has done so. Given that researchers and managed care organizations are quite interested in readmission rates, which can be a proxy for quality of care, doing so might be a good idea.

To learn more about Florida's efforts:
- read this Modern Healthcare article [1] (reg. req.)

Related Articles:
CA hospitals disclose more than 1,000 medical harm cases
[2]MA makes insurers disclose hospital pay rates [3]