Hospital Readmission Rates Found in Administrative Databases May Not Accurately Reflect Surgical Complications

Hospital administrative databases, which are designed to provide general information on hospital stays and associated costs, frequently are used to find information that can lead to quality assessments of care or clinical research. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) extracted data on hospital readmissions following spine surgery at their institution from an administrative database to assess the clinical relevance of the information and to define clinically relevant predictors of readmission. What they found were readmission numbers substantially larger than expected or appropriate. The researchers’ findings are reported in “Pitfalls of calculating hospital readmission rates based on non-validated administrative data sets. Clinical article,” by Beejal Y. Amin, MD, and colleagues. The article is available online, ahead of print, in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. For more information, click here to read the full release.