Trick or Treat: FY 2022 Hospital Readmission Reduction Program Penalties
Published on
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
Even though, Halloween has come and gone, the shift in your Hospital Readmission Reduction Program penalty for the new CMS Fiscal Year may or may not be a treat.
Did You Know?
It has been a decade since CMS began reducing payments to hospitals for excessive readmissions. The payment reduction is capped at 3 percent (that is, a payment adjustment factor of 0.97). And while your penalty rate is based on unplanned readmissions for the following six conditions, the penalty is applied to all Medicare Fee-for-Service inpatient discharges:
- Acute myocardial infarction (MI),
- Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD),
- Heart Failure (HF),
- Pneumonia,
- Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG) surgery, and
- Elective primary total hip arthroplasty and/or total knee arthroplasty (THA/TKA).
The CMS unplanned hospital visits provider data was last updated September 22, 2021 and released on October 27, 2021 (link). Note, data for the first and second quarters of 2020 are not included in this release due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. CMS has updated the Medicare Hospital Compare webpage (link) with the latest data release.
Why it Matters?
FY 2022 Readmission Reduction Penalties by the Numbers According to a Kaiser Health News article by Jordan Rau (link):
- 2,499 or 47% of all hospitals will be receiving reduced payments,
- The average penalty is a 0.64% reduction in payment,
- Congress’ Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) has noted that the average fines for a hospital in 2018 was $217,000.
- For FY 2022, 82% of hospitals will receive a penalty. This is nearly the same number of hospitals as last year.
What Can You Do?
I encourage you to read the Kaiser Health News article and access the accompanying Look-Up Tool (link) where you will find a trend of your hospitals Readmission Penalties from FY 2015 through 2022.
Article Author: Beth Cobb, RN, BSN, ACM, CCDS
Beth Cobb, RN, BSN, ACM, CCDS, is the Manager of Clinical Analytics at Medical Management Plus, Inc. Beth has over twenty-five years of experience in healthcare including eleven years in Case Management at a large multi-facility health system. In her current position, Beth is a principle writer for MMP’s Wednesday@One weekly e-newsletter, an active member of our HIPAA Compliance Committee, MMP’s Education Department Program Director and co-developer of MMP’s proprietary Compliance Protection Assessment Tool.
