Medicare patients who are frequently admitted to hospitals are beginning to cause extra fees for those facilities.
lets Medicare reduce funds to hospitals if patients are re-admitted within a month of being sent home. Last year, re-admission numbers went up in about a third of North Carolina's hospitals.
Pamela Duncan is director of Innovations and Transitional Outcomes at . She says her hospital commissioned research to learn the sources of return visits.
"And we found out where our most challenged nursing home are in terms of re-admissions," Duncan says.
"We found out what our home health agencies are; hospice and end-of-life care. We began to map where do our patients live that are most likely to bounce back? They live in the most socio-economically challenged areas in our region."
Duncan says they're forging partnerships with care providers in many of those areas. She says bringing re-admissions down is a slow process, but she expects numbers to come down by 2015 or 2016.
