Despite being a leading cause of hospital mortality, sepsis is excluded from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS’) targeted readmission metrics — an omission that raises critical concerns given sepsis’ profound impact on health care outcomes.
A new HQI analysis paper, Bridging the Gap: Developing a Standardized Metric for Sepsis Readmission Using CMS Methodologies, examines sepsis readmissions from patient-level discharge data, utilizing CMS’ condition-specific readmission methodology as a foundational framework for data analyzation. This approach also incorporates multiple definitions of sepsis to ensure comprehensive assessment of this historically overlooked area.
HQI’s analysis shares critical insights into readmission trends across these sepsis definitions, which allows for comparisons with other condition-specific metrics, such as heart failure and pneumonia. These findings shed light on whether readmission led to mortality — and serve as a foundation for devising innovative strategies and methodologies aimed at improving sepsis patient outcomes and minimizing hospital readmissions.
