SCAN: Complicated Patients Keep Coming Back

The analysts have based those figures on Medicare claims data compiled by Avalere Health L.L.C., Washington.

PPACA also has provided $500 million in funding that hospitals can use to reduce the likelihood that high-risk Medicare enrollees will return to the hospital. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is setting up Community-Based Care Transitions Program test programs in seven states.

The hospitals participating in the test programs are hoping they can prevent rehospitalizations by reducing medication errors, helping patients communicate better with care providers, and improving their own efforts to communicate with patients and patients’ other care providers, the SCAN analysts say.

The stakes are high because, for the traditional Medicare program alone, unplanned rehospitalizations cost about $17 billion in 2004, researchers report in a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009.