With the first round of CMS penalties about to come out for hospitals with unacceptable readmission rates, there will be a lot of people suddenly interested in ways to decrease their readmission rates. I’m guessing that a lot of those people will want to use the LACE index, developed in Ontario, Canada, to predict the risk of patients for death or unplanned readmission within 30 days of discharge. LACE is an acronym for Length of Stay, Acuity of admission, Co-morbities (as measured by a Charlson Score) and number of previous ED visits in the last six (6) months preceding this admission.