Sure. Or those hospitals gamed the system and didn't admit patients who should have been admitted. Or plenty of other explanations...
We call readmissions rate a Surrogate Marker. Something that isn't a hard outcome that we care about (that much), but rather an indicator of quality. We need surrogates to assess quality because hard outcomes are rarer. But this paper makes us think that maybe we need better markers.
We call readmissions rate a Surrogate Marker. Something that isn't a hard outcome that we care about (that much), but rather an indicator of quality. We need surrogates to assess quality because hard outcomes are rarer. But this paper makes us think that maybe we need better markers.