The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is test driving a new quality measurement model that pushes hospital readmissions measures out from 30 to 90 days.
DAJ/Thinkstock
Previous research has identified vascular surgery as having twice as high rates of 90-day readmissions, compared with 30-day readmissions (Am J Manag Care. 2014;20[9]:e432-e438), and this could prove problematic in light of the CMS pilot project currently underway, according to Donald E. Fry, MD, of MPA Healthcare Solutions, Chicago, and his colleagues.
They performed a study that found a high level of adverse outcomes for common vascular procedures and that there was a significant variability in risk-adjusted outcomes among best- and poorest-performing hospitals in all major vascular procedures, indicating that a large opportunity exists for improvement in results.
Medicare’s value-based care Readmissions Reduction Model developed financial penalties for hospitals that fail to achieve acceptable performance scores, and in doing so shifted some of the financial risks of care to the providers based on a 30-day readmission model. In contrast, the pilot Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) Advanced Program, which the CMS plans to launch in October 2018, will follow a 90-day period of postoperative care as its duration of financial accountability.
“While BPCI Advanced, has, until now, focused upon orthopedics, cardiovascular procedures, and high-volume medical admissions areas, it is anticipated that vascular surgery will be included in the future,” according to the investigators. Therefore, the researchers performed an in-depth analysis to examine the 90-day outcomes of common vascular surgeries across hospitals as a prelude to the vascular surgery field having to potentially confront this new CMS model (Surgery 2018 Jun 22 doi: 10.1016/j.surg.2018.03.025).
Dr. Donald E. Fry
Dr. Fry and his colleagues used the Medicare Limited Data Set for 2012-2014 to follow the outcomes of major vascular surgery beginning with the inpatient stay and on through 90 days of postoperative care. A pool of more than 500 aggregated and individual candidate risk factors, including age and sex, was used in model development, based upon data from 359 hospitals with 10,815 patients in the Medicare Limited Data Set.
The researchers examined the risk-adjusted outcomes of four major groupings of vascular surgery procedures: elective open aortic; open peripheral vascular procedures; endovascular aortic; and percutaneous angioplasty procedures.
They found that the total adverse-outcome rate (AO) was 27.8% for open aortic procedures, 31.5% for open peripheral vascular procedures, 19.6% for endovascular aortic procedures, and 36.4% for percutaneous angioplasty procedures. The difference in risk-adjusted adverse-outcome rates between the best- and the poorest- performing deciles was 32.2% for open aortic procedures, 29.5% for open peripheral vascular procedures, 21.5% for endovascular aortic procedures, and 37.1% for percutaneous angioplasty procedures.
The model determined significant risk factors (P less than .001) for inpatient death (including malnutrition, intestinal ischemia, supplemental oxygen, and age greater than or equal to 85 years); prolonged length of stay (including supplemental oxygen, peritoneal adhesions, and chronic lung obstructive disease); 90-day postdischarge death (including heart failure, chronic infection, psychosis, and primary head/neck cancer); and 90-day postdischarge readmission (malnutrition, chronic obstructive lung disease, upper aerodigestive tract cancer, and skin ulceration) for these procedures.
For all cases, the total 90-day postdischarge mortality rate exceeded the inpatient death rate, and readmissions were the major driver of the total AO. They found that 22% of all patients readmitted across the entire 90-day interval had not seen a physician for follow-up after discharge. [This] “begs the question of whether more frequent physician or physician-extender follow-up can reduce this AO,” according to Dr. Fry and his colleagues. “Importantly, first readmissions during days 31-90 following discharge were almost as common as those occurring during the initial 30 days. Over 20% of total readmissions were subsequently repeat events during the 90-day interval,” they added.
They also found that the variability in risk-adjusted outcomes among the best and poorest performing hospitals was over 20% in all of the major vascular procedures and indicates a large opportunity for improvement in results.
“Understanding variables associated with higher risk can be used as a decision support tool to identify which patients will need increased vigilance to avoid AOs. Identification of very high risk may become a consideration in the assessment of the appropriateness of the surgical intervention. If providers know their outcomes and those outcomes are benchmarked against the whole population of hospitals, then clinical performance can be improved by specific care redesign initiatives,” the researchers concluded.
Dr. Fry is executive vice president of MPA Healthcare Solutions, which funded the research.
SOURCE: Fry DE et al. Surgery 2018 Jun 22. doi: 10.1016/j.surg.2018.03.025.