The recently enacted Cures Act has what sounds like a better way for dealing with hospital-readmission penalties for safety-net hospitals..

A blog entry in Health Affairs notes: “The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), authorized by the Affordable Care Act, aims to improve care and outcomes for patients by assessing hospitals’ risk-standardized readmission rates. Hospitals that do not meet the readmission standard receive a penalty of up to 3 percent of their Medicare payments. Before the program’s inception, hospitals and academics raised concerns that readmissions penalties would have disproportionate impact on safety-net hospitals and might lead to worsening disparities. And, in fact, studies have shown that safety-net hospitals were more likely to be penalized than non-safety-net hospitals in the first years of the program.”

But, the article says, the Cures Act “changes this by instructing HHS to set different penalty thresholds for hospitals, based on the portion of Medicare-Medicaid dual eligible patients that are served by a hospital. What is critical to note is that this law—in contrast to prior proposals, which argued for changes to the readmission measures—directly mitigates the impact of penalties on safety-net hospitals.”

To read the Health Affairs piece, please hit this link.