Assessing the impact of nurse post-discharge telephone calls on 30-day hospital readmission rates.

ABSTRACT: Several care transition interventions propose that post-discharge phone calls can reduce adverse events and decrease costly return visits to the hospital. However, given the multi-faceted nature of most care transitions interventions, the true relationship between post-discharge phone calls and readmissions in a real world setting is uncertain.To determine the effect of receiving a post-discharge telephone call on all-cause 30-day readmission in a general medicine population.Retrospective observational study.Patients discharged home from the Medicine Service at a tertiary care academic medical center between November 2010 and May 2012.Patients received two telephone call attempts by a nurse within 72 h of discharge. Nurses followed a standard script to address issues associated with readmission.Billing data captured readmissions. We used logistic regression-adjusted patient and clinical covariates as well as a propensity score representing likelihood of being called to determine the association between call receipt and risk for readmission.There were 5,507 eligible patients. In unadjusted analyses, patients who received a call and completed the intervention were significantly less likely to be readmitted compared to those who did not [155 (5.8 %) vs 123 (8.6 %), p?

SUBMITTER: Harrison JD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4238208 | biostudies-other | 2014 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other