Figure 1. Hospital-level average expected net earnings (Medicare reimbursement revenue gain net of program costs) from an investment in a broad-scale readmission reduction program, by the number of conditions with EXRR>1.

Broad-scale implementation assumes targeting all patients hospitalized for any of the HRRP applicable condition, regardless of whether or not a hospital has excess readmissions for all conditions. The numbers are computed across all conditions, by using condition-specific net earnings estimates from Table 3 for conditions with excess readmissions, and only revenue losses from forgone readmissions and intervention costs for conditions without excess readmissions for which no HRRP penalty savings from further readmission avoidance can be expected. As in Table 3, four permutations of assumptions regarding the effectiveness and costs of the intervention are used. We display the means and 95% CIs of the expected net earnings from a broad-scale readmission reduction intervention. Points located below the x-axis represent negative expected net earnings (the cost of the intervention is expected to exceed the projected overall Medicare reimbursement revenue gain).