KNG Health assessed the minimal number of cases to achieve a reasonable level of reliability for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)’s measure of risk-standardized 30-day readmission rates. The 30-day all-cause readmission rates developed by Yale and reported by CMS currently use a threshold of 25 cases for each condition. Reliability measures the precision of a quality indicator. A high reliability on readmission rates means a higher level of confidence that difference in readmission rates across providers reflect the real difference in quality of care, instead of the difference associated with random chance. We determined the median reliability by number of months of data used, the percent of hospitals exceeding certain reliability thresholds, and the minimum number of cases needed to achieve various levels of reliability.
Services : Quality & Performance Measurement Expertise: Quality Measurement and Provider Performance
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