Page 2 How the US Health Care System Can Reduce Avoidable Read missions

Convening the Health Care Community on Reducing Readmissions

Reducing avoidable readmissions is not the sole province of hospitals—patients, caregivers, doctors,
nurses and other stakeholders play an important role in addressing this problem. AF4Q alliances are
working to engage those who give care, receive care, and pay for care in their communities to help
patients transition from hospital to home.

The AF4Q alliance in Cleveland, Better Health Greater Cleveland, has convened a quality improvement
network of 11 local and regional hospitals that has identified reducing avoidable readmissions for heart
failure patients as a primary goal. As part of the collaborative, nurses, hospital quality improvement
staff members and heart failure clinic staff members from different provider groups in the increasingly
competitive health care marketplace found common ground to discuss strategies, challenges and
successes to address the larger problem of reducing avoidable readmissions. Through its participation in
the Hospital Quality Network, Better Health Greater Cleveland has offered new resources, strategies,
performance metrics and definitions for benchmarking to participating providers.
The Cleveland alliance also measures potentially avoidable hospitalizations to better inform the
community about the need for change. The alliance’s 2013 public report analyzed hospitalizations
in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, finding that 2,854 fewer patients were hospitalized for cardiovascular
conditions from 2009 through 2011, saving $20.1 million. For the cardiovascular conditions that
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Better Health Greater Cleveland’s initiatives target, the report found that hospitalizations decreased
10.7 percent in 2011, after declining steadily in 2009 and 2010.
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In 2012, Healthy Memphis Common Table, which leads the AF4Q effort in Memphis, released a
report showing that timely and appropriate care could have prevented 12,722 hospitalizations in Shelby
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County, Tenn., saving approximately $87 million. The report examined disparities in preventable
hospitalizations based on race, sex, access to primary care, and whether a patient had a chronic illness.
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Though reports on reducing potentially avoidable hospitalizations do not focus solely on patients
returning to the hospital, they help providers identify ways to support patients managing chronic
conditions and ensure patients get the care they need outside the hospital—whether they have been
hospitalized yet or not.
LEARNING BY EXAMPLE
Watch a video about The Oregon Health Care Quality Corporation (Quality Corp), a statewide AF4Q alliance, also raised
how Healthy Memphis awareness about this issue in the community by hosting a conference where nearly 100 local health
Common Table is
working to prevent care stakeholders shared lessons on reducing avoidable readmissions. Quality Corp assessed the local
potentially avoidable landscape by cataloguing local initiatives that are working to reduce avoidable readmissions. Based on
hospitalizations.
this work, the state of Oregon is relying on Quality Corp to identify pilot projects and new strategies
that it will test to develop best practice guidelines.
Additional Resources from RWJF:
Better Care, Better Health, Lower Cost: It Takes a Community
Lessons Learned in Performance Measurement: A Community’s Approach to Reducing Readmissions
Status Report on Efforts to Understand and Create Awareness of Potentially Avoidable
Hospitalizations in Memphis and Shelby County, Tennessee
Oregon Tackles Hospital Readmissions Through Multi-stakeholder Conference

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