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Hospital Readmission Reduction
Background£º
Hospital readmission is a hospital admission that occurs within a specified time frame (usually 30 days)
after discharge from the previous admission.
Excessive hospital readmissions results in a significant cost for America¡¯s healthcare system.
Many efforts in readmission reduction were investigated by healthcare organizations.
Most of these efforts were focused on improving discharging process and patient follow up process after discharging.
Although these efforts were useful, all of them involve considerable personnel and funding resources.
From our initial study, most readmissions are caused by a relatively small number of patients with high or medium readmission risks.
Also, significant variation in readmission risks exists among different doctors and treatment units.
Adopting a more focused approach on high/medium risk patients and process improvement for readmission prone doctors/treatment units,
reducing hospital readmission rate is possible and more effective with limited resources.
Proposed Approach£º
In this project, our group will develop a readmission causal analysis and resolution approach.
This approach will guide healthcare professionals to pull the data from healthcare IT system, and use data to do the following:
1) Identify the sets of high (>30%) and medium readmission (15-30%) risk patients;
2) Identify the patient related factors that lead to high readmission (type of medical diagnosis, type of treatment specialties, etc)
3) Identify the list of treatment units and doctors (wards, primary care provider team, provider, etc) with high patient readmission risk.
4) Based on the above information, WSU will:
a. Design and implement discharging/follow up procedures based on patient readmission risk, types of medical diagnosis,
and provide existing template/best practice examples in the toolkit.
b. Evaluate existing processes in treatment units that have high patient readmission risk, and provide recommendations for improvements.
Related funded projects
Readmission Causal Analysis and Resolution Toolkit, US Department of Veteran Affairs, (PI 100%) $96,000, 5/13-4/14
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