Medicare 30-Day Hospital Readmissions (CMS)

Limitations

Original Medicare (fee-for-service) only: beneficiaries in Original Medicare Parts A and B, counted for each month entitled, not all enrollees. In 2024 those beneficiaries were 35% of Georgia's Medicare beneficiaries and 20-49% of each county's (Medicare Advantage up to 76%, Clayton County), so county figures can describe a fee-for-service minority. All-cause (planned or not), not risk-adjusted. Counts fall as Original Medicare shrinks: compare years by the rate. Small counties may be NULL. readmission_rate is CMS's figure: readmissions within 30 days of discharge from an acute care hospital stay divided by the admissions where the patient was discharged alive. CMS does not publish those admissions, so no combined rate for several counties can be computed here (never average county rates). num_readmissions counts readmissions, not people. Counted by where beneficiaries live, not where they were treated: these are not CMS's hospital readmission measures (Care Compare, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program), which count only unplanned readmissions, are risk-adjusted and are reported by hospital, for specific conditions or hospital-wide. Georgia's Original Medicare population shrank as Medicare Advantage grew (948,452 beneficiaries in 2014, 716,088 in 2024; under 65, 185,914 and 66,491), so a change over time can reflect who remains in Original Medicare as well as care; the readmission counts fall with it, so compare years by the rate. Beneficiaries under 65 (entitled by disability or end-stage renal disease) are readmitted more often: in 2024, 26.2% under 65 and 17.4% at 65 and over in Georgia. age_bracket 'under_65' and '65_plus' exist for Georgia only; county rows are 'all'. Who is covered: CMS counts the hospital stays of beneficiaries with Part A, Part B and Original Medicare for every month they were entitled, new enrollees and people who died during the year included; anyone in Medicare Advantage at any point in the year, or with Part A or Part B alone, is left out. CMS suppresses figures built on fewer than 11 beneficiaries or service users ('*'); they are NULL here and never filled in from other figures. CMS suppresses the count and the rate together where a county had too few readmissions (every published count is at least 11): 38 county rows in this release, in 11 small counties (most often Taliaferro in 7 years, Chattahoochee 6, Webster 5); Georgia's rows are never suppressed. CMS's GA-UNKNOWN row (13000), beneficiaries placed in no county, is fully suppressed and left out. Georgia's row is CMS's own figure, not a sum of the county rows: it also counts the handful of beneficiaries CMS places in no county (GA-UNKNOWN), so the 159 counties need not add up to it exactly. The county readmission counts also leave out suppressed counties, so they never add up to more than Georgia's. From CMS's 2014-2024 release (file updated 2026-04-29); each release restates earlier years, so the figures here are replaced when the data is refreshed. tract_geoid is always NULL.