BREMERTON From Harrison Medical Center to pharmacies, dozens of local health organization are banding together to meet health care reform head on.

A new effort tasked with pulling it off is the Kitsap County Cross Continuum Care Transitions Project, or KC4TP for short.

One of its biggest goals: reduce the rate of hospital readmissions within 30 days for Medicare patients.

The benefit for patients: care thats more attentive to detail as the patient is moved from hospital to nursing home, assisted living or home.

Right now, 20 percent of Medicare patients nationally are readmitted to hospitals within a month after being discharged. Their follow-up care, in some instances, hasnt been all that it could be.

This represents a failure in either the care of the patient thats given or the discharge, said Lauren Newcomer, director of quality and operational improvement at Harrison and one of the KC4TP leaders.

Unnecessary readmissions are a no-no under federal health care reform, because it costs more money to put patients back into the most expensive settings.

Currently under reform, hospitals are penalized 1 percent of total Medicare reimbursements for having too many readmissions. That jumps to 3 percent by 2017.

Its a huge amount of money thats at stake, Newcomer said.

Harrison hasnt had to pay any penalties. If it had, 1 percent would have amounted to $650,000; 3 percent would have been $1.95 million, according to Harrison spokeswoman Jacquie Goodwill.

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