One of the lesser-known provisions of the controversial Affordable Care Act tasked Medicare with monitoring hospital performance on certain metrics. One of them is the patient readmission rate.
Readmission refers to a patient who returns to the hospital and is readmitted within a short time of being discharged. The logic behind Medicare’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) makes sense: Hospitals should get it right the first time, rather than being paid for repeat care that potentially could have been avoided.
In our experience, hospitals run into readmission trouble with their nursing staff, case managers, and social workers aren’t on the ball by arranging at-home patient needs including prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, therapy, and nursing or home health care.
The program hits under-performing hospitals in the one place that really hurts them—their pocketbooks. This comes in the form of a penalty in the reimbursement rate that Medicare uses to pay hospitals for each Medicare patient that’s treated.
The maximum penalty Medicare imposes under the program is 3% across the board. Of the 3,046 hospitals that Medicare evaluated, only 39 will be hit with the maximum penalty for fiscal year 2022. Nearly 20% of the hospitals—seven in total—are in Texas.
Texas hospitals sanctioned with maximum Medicare penalty for 2022
• Baylor Scott & White Medical Center-Uptown, located at 2727 Lemmon Ave, Dallas, TX 75204
• Baylor Scott & White Surgical Hospital-Fort Worth, located at 1800 Park Place Avenue Fort Worth Texas 76110
• Christus Good Shepherd Medical Center, located at 700 E Marshall Ave, Longview, TX 75601
• Lubbock Heart Hospital, located at 4810 N Loop 289, in Lubbock
• Memorial Hermann Surgical Hospital Kingwood , located at 300 Kingwood Medical Dr., in Houston
• Methodist McKinney Hospital, located at 8000 Eldorado Parkway, in McKinney
• Sugar Land Surgical Hospital, located at 16906 SW Freeway, in Sugar Land
If you’ve been seriously injured because of poor hospital care in Texas, then contact a top-rated, experienced Texas medical malpractice attorney for a free consultation about your potential case. Painter Law Firm represents injured patients throughout the State of Texas.
