Stephen Rosenthal Discusses Influences of Hospital Readmissions

In terms of managing hospital readmissions, Stephen Rosenthal, senior vice president of population health management at the Montefiore Health System, said that a hospital must not only consider the care given to a patient but the social situation he or she may be coming from.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What are some of the challenges facing hospitals that are implementing new payment models?

Well, hospitals as you can imagine are not structurally set up for population management. And, many of the payment models really are focusing on changes in the population, particularly issues around readmissions, where potentially avoidable initial admissions or readmissions are difficult for a hospital to manage because often the challenges are not directly related to the care given in the hospital but perhaps the social situations that those individuals are coming from.

Whether they have a stable home environment, whether those who are in their home helping them perceive things to be perhaps worse than they actually are and then when patients come back to emergency rooms, emergency rooms are often geared towards worrying about the safety of a patient’s health so they tend to admit patients perhaps more frequently as a result of that. Particularly patients who are focused on the government programs.