Editors’ Top Five Week of September 11

CMS Expects Few Hospitals to Participate in Readmissions Experiment
Few providers are expected to volunteer for an experiment to help track unplanned readmissions and their causes, even though the pilot is a precursor for a mandatory change in how hospitals are penalized. (Virgil Dickson/Modern Healthcare)

How Skilled Nursing Could Help Fight Pop Drop
By offering more short-term stay services, skilled nursing facilities could help keep spousal caregivers from dropping their partners off at the emergency department as a source of respite, a phenomenon known in some medical circles as “pop drop.” (Tim Regan/Skilled Nursing News)

Shedding New Light on Hospice Care: No Need to Wait for The “Brink Of Death”
New research confirms that hospice patients report better pain control, more satisfaction with their care and fewer deaths in the hospital or intensive care units than other people with similarly short life expectancies. (Judith Graham/Kaiser Health News)

What Older Americans Stand to Lose if Dreamers Are Deported
Surveys of DACA beneficiaries reveal that roughly one-fifth of them work in the health care and educational sector, suggesting a potential loss of tens of thousands of workers from in-demand job categories like home health aide and nursing assistant. (Noam Scheiber and Rachel Abrams/New York Times)

After Harvey Hit, a Texas Hospital Decided to Evacuate. Here’s How Patients Got Out
Emptying even a modest-sized hospital during a disaster often requires a vast logistical effort and the cooperation of ambulance teams and other hospitals. Sometimes a health system has enough resources to transfer patients within its own network of hospitals. But when that is not possible, Texas has procedures in place to move patients en masse. (Sheri Fink and Andrew Burton/New York Times)