Since October 1, 2012, the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program, established by the Affordable Care Act, has imposed financial penalties on hospitals with high readmission rates for targeted conditions covered by Medicare. This program has led to reductions in readmissions even for conditions that were not initially targeted for such penalties.1 Although this program has almost exclusively ta...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether pediatric readmissions within 15 days of discharge were considered preventable. METHODS Retrospective chart review of 200 randomly selected readmissions (8% of all readmissions) occurring within 15 days of discharge from a freestanding children's hospital between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2008. The degree of preventability was assessed independently for ...

Beliefs about the extent to which health problems can be prevented reflect an understanding that preventive measures can reduce adverse health events and the level of control individuals perceive that they hold over the factors that affect their health. A population survey of 1659 people conducted in 1995 in south western Sydney, Australia, found that only child drownings, tooth decay, skin can...

Emergence of serogroup B meningococci of clonal complex sequence type (ST) 41/44 can cause high levels of disease, as exemplified by a recent epidemic in New Zealand. Multiplication of annual incidence rates (3.1 cases/100,000 population) of meningococcal disease in a defined German region, the city of Aachen and 3 neighboring countries (Greater Aachen) prompted us to investigate and determine ...

BACKGROUND Adverse drug events (ADEs) may lead to serious injury and may result in malpractice claims. While ADEs resulting in claims are not representative of all ADEs, such data provide a useful resource for studying ADEs. Therefore, we conducted a review of medication-related malpractice claims to study their frequency, nature, and costs and to assess the human factor failures associated wit...

OBJECTIVE We sought to examine etiology and preventability of maternal death and the causal relationship of cesarean delivery to maternal death in a series of approximately 1.5 million deliveries between 2000 and 2006. STUDY DESIGN This was a retrospective medical records extraction of data from all maternal deaths in this time period, augmented when necessary by interviews with involved heal...

INTRODUCTION Adverse events in hospitals constitute a serious problem with grave consequences. Many studies have been conducted to gain an insight into this problem, but a general overview of the data is lacking. We performed a systematic review of the literature on in-hospital adverse events. METHODS A formal search of Embase, Cochrane and Medline was performed. Studies were reviewed indepen...

OBJECTIVE To identify, classify and quantify the frequency of negative clinical adverse drug reactions (ADR) resulting in hospital admission from the emergency department (ED). To determine ADR preventability, identify ADR-related admission factors, calculate related costs and recognise which drugs are the most often involved. METHOD Cross-sectional, prospective and observational study of pat...