Hospital-Wide Adult All-Payer Readmissions in Massachusetts: SFY 2011-2021

The Hospital-Wide Adult All-Payer Readmissions in Massachusetts: SFY 2011-2021 report presents statewide readmissions by patient characteristics, reason for initial hospitalization, readmission rates for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 discharges, and readmission rates for individual hospitals and groups of hospitals.

Additionally, this is the second report to incorporate social risk factors into the risk-standardization methodology for hospital readmission rates to provide a more equitable basis for the comparison of hospital performance.

Key Findings

• The unplanned, all-payer readmission rate for Massachusetts stayed the same from 2020 to 2021, at 16.0%.
  
  
  
• Medicare and Medicaid patients had higher rates (18.2% and 17.0%, respectively) than commercially insured patients (10.3%).
  
  
  
• Readmission rates for patients hospitalized with any diagnosis of COVID-19 were consistently lower than for patients hospitalized for reasons other than COVID-19, 11.7% vs. 15.6%, respectively, in the last quarter of SFY 2021.
  
  
  
• Patients with four or more hospitalizations within 12 months accounted for half (50%) of all readmissions.