Higher Readmissions at Safety-Net Hospitals and Potential Policy Solutions

The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), established by the Affordable Care Act, ties a hospital's payments to its readmission rates -- with penalties for hospitals that exceed a national benchmark -- to encourage hospitals to reduce avoidable readmissions. This new Commonwealth Fund analysis uses publicly reported 30-day hospital readmission rate data to examine whether safety-net hospitals are more likely to have higher readmission rates, compared with other hospitals. Results of this analysis find that safety-net hospitals are 30 percent more likely to have 30-day hospital readmission rates above the national average, compared with non-safety-net hospitals, and will therefore be disproportionately impacted by the HRRP. Policy solutions to help safety-net hospitals reduce their readmission rates include targeting quality improvement initiatives for safety-net hospitals; ensuring that broader delivery system improvements include safety-net hospitals and care delivery systems; and enhancing bundled payment rates to account for socioeconomic risk factors

Measuring Hospital Performance: The Importance of Process Measures

Evaluates the effectiveness of Hospital Quality Alliance standards, and identifies specific activities hospitals can work on to improve performance and deliver higher quality health care

Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on Health Care Delivery System Reform

Presents findings of a survey of experts on reforming delivery systems -- organized delivery systems, patient-centered medical homes, and retail clinics -- and recommended policy strategies, such as improving the primary care system

Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on the Transparency of Health Care Quality and Price Information in the United States

Presents findings from a survey of experts on collecting and reporting public information on the quality and price of healthcare services; the role of transparency in improving quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness; and obstacles

Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on the Quality and Safety of Health Care in the United States

Presents findings from an annual survey of a diverse group of experts on strategies to improve the quality and safety of health care in the United States

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Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on Vulnerable Populations in the U.S. Health System

Presents survey responses from healthcare experts about the equity of the health system; healthcare reform's potential effects on safety-net institutions, access, and financial protection; and strategies for improving quality of care

Achieving Better Quality of Care for Low-Income Populations: The Roles of Health Insurance and the Medical Home in Reducing Health Inequities

Outlines the importance of having both insurance and a medical home in reducing health and healthcare disparities for low-income adults, including access to care, preventive screenings, and satisfaction with quality of care. Makes policy recommendations

Digging Deeper for New Physics in the LHC Data

In this paper we describe a novel, model-independent technique of "rectangular aggregations" for mining the LHC data for hints of new physics. A typical (CMS) search now has hundreds of signal regions, which can obscure potentially interesting anomalies. Applying our technique to the two CMS jets+MET SUSY searches, we identify a set of previously overlooked $\sim 3\sigma$ excesses. Among these, four excesses survive tests of inter- and intra-search compatibility, and two are especially interesting: they are largely overlapping between the jets+MET searches and are characterized by low jet multiplicity, zero $b$-jets, and low MET and $H_T$. We find that resonant color-triplet production decaying to a quark plus an invisible particle provides an excellent fit to these two excesses and all other data -- including the ATLAS jets+MET search, which actually sees a correlated excess. We discuss the additional constraints coming from dijet resonance searches, monojet searches and pair production. Based on these results, we believe the wide-spread view that the LHC data contains no interesting excesses is greatly exaggerated.Comment: 31 pages + appendices, 14 figures, source code for recasted searches attached as auxiliary materia

An Update on the LHC Monojet Excess

In previous work, we identified an anomalous number of events in the LHC jets+MET searches characterized by low jet multiplicity and low-to-moderate transverse energy variables. Here, we update this analysis with results from a new ATLAS search in the monojet channel which also shows a consistent excess. As before, we find that this "monojet excess" is well-described by the resonant production of a heavy colored state decaying to a quark and a massive invisible particle. In the combined ATLAS and CMS data, we now find a local (global) preference of 3.3$\sigma$ (2.5$\sigma$) for the new physics model over the Standard Model-only hypothesis. As the signal regions containing the excess are systematics-limited, we consider additional cuts to enhance the signal-to-background ratio. We show that binning finer in $H_T$ and requiring the jets to be more central can increase $S/B$ by a factor of ${\sim} 1.5$.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, source for analysis code used in this paper in attached Ancillary file