Hospitals across the country are trying to clamp down on frequent readmissions in anticipation of new penalties Medicare is readying. But it's a bigger probolem at hospitals that treat lots of low-income patients. Poorer folks are more likely to be readmitted, so hospitals that treat a lot of them face special challenges at the same time those hospitals often have fewer resources, researchers have found.
Indeed, places that have the highest proportion of poor patients are nearly three times as likely to have high heart readmission rates, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis. That's the case with New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, Howard University Hospital in Washington and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore. (KHN has an interactive chartwhere you can look up hospitals in your region to see their heart failure readmission rate and the poverty level of their patients).
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