http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/he...2hospital.html
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The nation spends billions of dollars a year on patients’ return visits to the hospital — many of which are readmissions that could be prevented with better follow-up care, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
As many as a fifth of all Medicare patients are readmitted within a month of being discharged, according to the study, and a third are rehospitalized within 90 days.
Half the patients who returned to the hospital within 30 days of undergoing treatment other than surgery apparently did not see a doctor before they came back.
The high rate of hospital readmissions is “one of the fruits of an increasingly fragmented health care system,” said Dr. Stephen F. Jencks, a former Medicare official who is an author of the study, which analyzed Medicare claims information for 2003 and 2004.
He estimated that the cost of the unplanned return trips was $17 billion in 2004 alone.
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