“Adjusting for Social Risk Factors Impacts Performance and Penalties in the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program”,  co-authored by Daniel C. Tosteson Professor of Health Care Policy (Statistics) Alan M. Zaslavsky  PhD, has been selected as Health Services Research’s 2020 John M. Eisenberg Article-of-the-Year.

The paper, led by assistant professor of medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis Karen Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH, discusses the use of hospital readmission rates as an indicator of quality of hospital care. The authors found that readmission scores were substantially affected by the social composition of the hospital’s patients. Poverty, housing instability, and disability were all associated with higher readmission rates. Under Medicare’s Hospital Readmission Reduction Program, safety-net hospitals had higher readmission rates: adding social factors to the risk adjustment cut these rates in half, causing a reduction of $17 million in penalties for safety-net hospitals.

The John M. Eisenberg Article-of-the-Year Award was established in 2003 to recognize outstanding original research among articles published in Health Services Research journal relevant to the policy areas that the late Dr. Eisenberg studied or promoted during his tenure as Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.