Many readmissions are considered avoidable if the care provided in the preceding admission was of high quality. Furthermore, readmissions lead to significant burdens not only on the healthcare system, but also on individual patients. One in five Medicare beneficiaries is readmitted within 30 days, at a cost of more than $26 billion per year. Reduction of hospital readmission rates is essential to contain unnecessary health care costs and improve the quality of inpatient care. Reducing 30-day hospital readmissions has become an important focus of the current national payment policies in the U.S. Changes in staff responsiveness may offer an additional tool for hospitals to employ ongoing efforts to achieve reductions in readmissions, an important objective both financially and for patient health outcomes. Our findings suggest that elements of care related to staff responsiveness during patients’ stay may influence rehospitalization rates. We found that neither communication with physicians nor communication with nurses was significantly associated with hospital readmissions. A ten-percentage-point increase in staff responsiveness led to a 0.03–0.18 percentage point decrease in readmission rates. The effect size depended on the baseline readmission rates, with the largest effect on hospitals in the upper 75th quartile. Our finding suggests that hospitals with better staff responsiveness were significantly more likely to have lower 30-day readmissions for all conditions. Patient experience of hospital-staff responsiveness as “top-box” ranged from 64% to 67% across the six clinical conditions, communication with nurses ranged from 77% to 79% and communication with doctors ranged from 80% to 81% (higher numbers are better). The average 30-day readmission rates ranged from 5.19% for knee/hip surgery to 22.7% for COPD. The number of hospitals with reported readmissions ranged from 2234 hospitals for AMI to 3758 hospitals for pneumonia. Data included all acute care hospitals reporting in Hospital Compare in 2014. We selected six different clinical conditions for analyses, including acute myocardial infarction (AMI), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure, hip/knee surgery, pneumonia, and stroke. We established multivariate regression models in which 30-day risk-adjusted readmission rates were the dependent variables and patients’ perceptions of the responsiveness of the hospital staff and communication (as measured by the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores) were the independent variables of interest. However, the extent to which patients’ experience with hospital care is related to hospital readmission is unknown. Medicare requires that hospitals collect and report patients’ experience with their care as a condition of payment. Reducing 30-day hospital readmissions has become a focus of the current national payment policies.
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