Sepsis-Associated 30-Day Risk-Standardized Readmissions: Analysis of a Nationwide Medicare Sample*

Objectives: To determine national readmission rates among sepsis survivors, variations in rates between hospitals, and determine whether measures of quality correlate with performance on sepsis readmissions. Design: Cross-sectional study of sepsis readmissions between 2008 and 2011 in the Medicare fee-for-service database. Setting: Acute care, Medicare participating hospitals from 2008 to 2011. Patients: Septic patients as identified by International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision codes using the Angus method. Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: We generated hospital-level, risk-standardized, 30-day readmission rates among survivors of sepsis and compared rates across region, ownership, teaching status, sepsis volume, hospital size, and proportion of underserved patients. We examined the relationship between risk-standardized readmission rates and hospital-level composite measures of quality and mortality. From 633,407 hospitalizations among 3,315 hospitals from 2008 to 2011, median risk-standardized readmission rates was 28.7% (interquartile range, 26.1–31.9). There were differences in risk-standardized readmission rates by region (Northeast, 30.4%; South, 29.6%; Midwest, 28.8%; and West, 27.7%; p

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