Introduction
Hospital readmissions within 30 days of discharge are a widely recognized metric for evaluating healthcare quality, patient safety, and cost efficiency. These rates are closely monitored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to drive performance improvements across U.S. hospitals.
This interactive dashboard visualizes reported 30-day readmission rates across facilities and conditions from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023. It enables stakeholders to assess patterns across hospitals and states and identify where readmission rates are highest.
Objective
To analyze and present CMS-reported actual readmission rates by hospital and condition, enabling comparison across facilities, states, and care types. The focus is on observed performance—not risk-adjusted or expected rates.
Dashboard Overview
The dashboard includes four key components:
1. Hospital Readmission Rate Distribution
A scatterplot chart displaying individual hospitals and their raw 30-day readmission rates. This allows for quick identification of outliers and clustering patterns by condition or geography.
2. Top and Bottom Hospitals
Bar charts highlight:
- Hospitals with the highest readmission rates (potential quality concern areas)
- Hospitals with the lowest readmission rates (indicating best practices)
These views help users benchmark facilities against each other in a transparent, data-driven format.
3. U.S. State-Level Readmission Map
A color-coded map shows average readmission rates by state, revealing potential regional disparities and system-wide trends.
4. Interactive Filters
Users can filter the dashboard by:
- Medical condition (e.g., heart failure, pneumonia, COPD, CABG, etc.)
- State
- Readmission rate range
This interactivity supports targeted exploration for healthcare administrators, analysts, and researchers.
Key Insights
- Readmission rates vary widely across hospitals, even within the same condition or region.
- States with higher overall averages may reflect gaps in post-discharge care or chronic disease management infrastructure.
- Top-performing hospitals demonstrate significantly lower readmission rates, likely due to strong care transitions and follow-up procedures.
- Heart-related conditions and pneumonia remain leading contributors to hospital readmissions nationwide.
Tools & Methods
- Data Source: CMS FY2025 Hospital Readmissions dataset (2020–2023)
- Data Cleaning: Performed in Python (pandas), including removal of incomplete records and conversion of numeric fields
- Dashboarding Tool: Tableau Public
- Design Emphasis: Usability, benchmarking, and actionable filtering
Use Cases
- Hospital administrators identifying improvement opportunities
- Public health agencies monitoring regional performance
- Consultants and analysts supporting value-based care models
- Researchers and educators visualizing real-world outcomes
Pacifica Data 
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