Reliability of Readmission Rates as a Hospital Quality Measure in Cardiac Surgery

Quality metrics based on administrative databases are sometimes unreliable. This study examined data from nearly 245,000 Medicare patients undergoing CABG to determine the reliability of 30-day readmission rates and whether that metric is an appropriate indicator of hospital quality. The median readmission rate was 17.6%, but less than half lf the rate was attributed to the true signal, the rest being measurement noise. Less than 5% of hospitals had sufficient CABG volume to achieve reliable measurement of readmission rates.