Mayo Clinic pinpointed specific efforts that if taken could reduce 30-day hospital readmissions by close to 20 percent.
"Reducing early hospital readmissions is a policy priority aimed at improving quality of care and lowering costs," Aaron Leppin, M.D., a research associate in Mayo Clinic's Knowledge and Evaluation Research Unit said in a news release. "Most importantly, we need to address this issue because hospital readmissions have a big impact on our patients' lives."
About one in five Medicare beneficiaries are readmitted within 30 days of hospitalization; this can rack up costs of up to $26 billion a year.
"Patients are sent home from hospitals because we have addressed their acute issues," Dr. Leppin said. "They go home with a list of tasks that include what they were doing prior to the hospitalization and new self-care tasks prescribed on discharge. Some patients cannot handle all these requests, and it is not uncommon for them to be readmitted soon after they get home. Sometimes these readmissions can be prevented."
To make their findings the researchers reviewed 47 randomized trials that looked at hospital readmission.
"Effective approaches often are multifaceted and proactively seek to understand the complete patient context, often including in-person visits to the patient's home after discharge," Dr. Leppin said. "This helps us assess the patients' living environment, their level of support, their resources, and their psychological and physical limitations."
The researchers noticed in the past hospitals had been using "simpler, more 'high tech'" strategies, which have been proven to be less effective. The types of strategies that can reduce hospital readmissions by almost 40 percent are more complex and are "designed to help patients deal with the work of being a patient." The news release reported. These types of interventions could also help save taxpayers a large sum of money.
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