TITLE:
Evaluating Changes in Drivers of Hospital Readmissions at the Community Level
AUTHORS:
Ronald Lagoe, Shelly Littau
KEYWORDS:
Hospital Readmissions, Hospitalization, Hospital Outcomes
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Nursing,
Vol.5 No.8,
August
5,
2015
ABSTRACT: This study involved evaluation of the impact of drivers of changes in adult medicine readmission rates in the hospitals of Syracuse, New York. The study focused on this population because adult medicine readmissions were the largest source of medical-surgical and aggregate inpatient readmissions in the local hospitals. The study focused on identifying and correlating readmission rates for specific indicators over a twenty seven month period. Probably, the most important findings identified in the data were the high readmission rates for patients with high severity of illness and the strong correlations between readmission rates for these patients and total adult medicine readmission rates. Correlations between these readmission rates over the twenty seven month period exceeded 0.7000 for each of the hospitals. The study also identified readmission rates and correlations between rates for specific indicators including patient origin and chronic care diagnoses with readmission rates for all of adult medicine. The results of the study identified challenges facing hospital efforts to reduce readmissions including the need to provide alternative services for patients with high severity of illness and the need to address the impacts of multiple chronic diagnoses.