February 24th, 2012
A Call for Help to Reduce Readmissions
Harlan M. Krumholz, MD, SM
The national focus on readmissions (e.g., Partnership for Patients) has yet to yield improvements in performance. Many clinicians and hospitals are seeking help in their efforts to reduce readmission rates.
Hospital to Home, a national quality improvement initiative led by the American College of Cardiology and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has posted a list of links to programs and tools that might be helpful to you.
Most recently we posted a link to resources organized by the VA. The VA toolkit includes order sets, pathways, and guidelines. We will only make progress by sharing what we learn and creating learning communities in which we share our experience. If you have tools or experiences to share, please let us know. And consider contributing them to the H2H community.
One Response to “A Call for Help to Reduce Readmissions”
NEJM Journal Watch — Recent Cardiology Articles- Extensive Ablation vs. Pulmonary Vein Isolation in Persistent Atrial Fibrillation
- Can a Novel Stent Design Improve Long-Term Outcomes of Percutaneous Coronary Intervention?
- Are Angiographically-Derived Coronary Physiology Measurements Ready for Use in the Cath Lab?
- A Randomized Trial of Transcatheter Edge-to-Edge Repair for Severe Tricuspid Regurgitation
- An Early Look at a Novel Intranasal Loop Diuretic
Timely measurement and risk prediction are critical to understand the gap and tailor potential interventions. Does anyone have a parsimonious risk prediction model that clinicians can use to categorize the risk for readmissions? Otherwise, it may not be cost-effective or clinically-effective to throw the “kitchen sink” (doing everything possible) for 100% of patients when the overall rate is 20-25%.