Healthcare Management Analytics Lab – UChicago Booth
Evaluating an Intervention to Reduce Heart Failure Readmissions
Heart failure is the number-‐one diagnosis for hospitalized patients over 65 and costs the US health system $35 billion each year. To incentivize quality of care, Medicare penalizes hospitals when patients are readmitted within 30 days of a prior discharge. Our sponsor, a major Chicago-area cardiac referral center, lost a substantial percentage of readmissions to competing hospitals and forecasts significant penalties this year — symptoms of the need for strategic process improvement. As remedy, the sponsor piloted a new “clinical pathway”: a bundle of process changes designed to improve patient outcomes, reduce variation in care, and enhance case management.
This project will proceed in stages:
- Describe the clinical and operational predictors of readmission by directly observing/consulting on the process of in-‐hospital care delivery and by analyzing electronic medical record data.
- Evaluate the new pathway’s effectiveness using a well-designed experiment, advanced statistical analysis, and appropriate software.
- Once versed in the operational and financial challenges of real-‐world healthcare, compute ROI and present full-‐scope recommendations to the sponsor’s senior leadership for broader implementation.
UChicago Medicine Project Liaison(s):
Corey Tabit, MD, MBA, MPH,