To reduce preventable readmissions, a healthcare business strategy expert advised SNFs to follow the logic of the infamous Willie Sutton. “Go where the money is in preventing readmissions,” said Andrew M. Kramer, MD, chief executive officer of Providigm.

“Understand what preventable readmissions are. Understand what people’s risks for preventable readmissions are and target your efforts on those,” he added.

Kramer, along with Michael K. Lin, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Providigm, was the speaker for the McKnight’s webinar “Reducing Preventable Readmissions From SNFs” on Wednesday. The webinar was sponsored by Medline.

The first reason providers should focus on reducing potentially preventable readmissions is because of upcoming legal and reimbursement changes, Kramer said. The Health and Human Services Secretary will develop a measure “to reflect an all-condition, risk-adjusted potentially preventable hospital readmission rate” no later than Oct. 1, 2016, according to “Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014.”

More importantly, potentially preventable readmissions represent about half of all readmissions and can be avoided by providing quality care, Kramer added.

The most efficient way to address this issue is to use a Quality Assurance/Performance Improvement plan because it is predictive and not subjective, Kramer and Lin reiterated throughout the webinar.

They suggested four steps to achieve this method:

  • Predict risk factors of potentially preventable readmissions
  • Attend to identified risk factors for each resident
  • Complete a retrospective root cause analysis and use QAPI for improvement

To listen to the webinar, click here.