We acknowledge here and in our paper1 that the Potentially Preventable Readmissions (PPRs) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) readmission measures are intended to be used for hospital-level comparisons of risk-adjusted rates. The premise behind both measures is that hospitals or providers with higher than expected rates have more readmissions associated with quality of care problems during the index admission and postdischarge periods.2 ,3 However, the PPRs purport to improve upon the CMS all-cause readmission measure by including readmissions that are more likely to be preventable. For both measures, in order to improve rates, a hospital or provider would have to drill down to the individual discharge or patient level to examine further if there were any quality-of-care issues.

Since we wanted to know if the PPRs provided any additional benefit for this purpose beyond …