Veterans Health Administration discharge telephone follow-up and 30-day hospital readmissions

• Main Author: Goss, Tyler
• Other Authors: Scott-Cawiezell, Jill
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of Iowa 2015
• Subjects: Discharge Telephone Follow-up; Hospital Readmissions; Transitional Care; Veterans Affairs; Veterans Health Administration; Nursing
• Online Access: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5940; https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7421&context=etd

Healthcare costs have risen from 13.8% in 2000 to 17.9% in 2009 (Gordon, Leiman, Deland, & Pardes, 2014). Poor transitional care has been identified as a cause of the high healthcare costs (Naylor et al., 2013; Obama, 2013). In 2009, the Department of Veterans Health Administration (VHA) implemented a national reform of outpatient care to create Patient-Aligned Care Teams (PACTs) with a goal to improve transitional care and reintegration into outpatient care through registered nurse case managers conducting discharge telephone follow-up calls. However, discharge telephone follow-up calls have not been explored within the VHA. This study explored the relationships among discharge telephone follow-up calls, selected Veteran characteristics including the length of index hospital stay, and 30-day all cause hospital readmissions between fiscal years 2011 and 2013. Hospital readmissions were explored in parallel time periods to the timing of the discharge telephone follow-up calls. Study data were collected retrospectively from VHA inpatient and outpatient records. Descriptive statistics, measures of central tendency, bivariate statistics, and logistic regression were used to analyze the data. The study found 124,069 Veterans were discharged from the VHA from 2011 to 2013. Of those discharges, 15,954 (12.86%) were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days and 35.06% of the readmissions occurred within the first seven days after discharge. Discharge telephone follow-up calls increased from 312 in 2011 to 26,549 in 2013. Increasing Veteran age, number of comorbidities, length of index hospital stay, and being identified as frequently hospitalized in the previous year were significantly related to hospital readmissions at each of the hospital readmission time frames (within two days, between three and seven days, and between eight and thirty days after hospital discharge). This study identified a relationship between discharge telephone follow-up calls and the parallel hospital readmission time period. However, only discharge telephone follow-up calls within two days were found to decrease the likelihood of hospital readmissions and only hospital readmissions within two days after discharge (OR=0.595). The relationships between discharge telephone follow-up calls and hospital readmissions potentially explains previously mixed results and suggests two potential explanations. One, discharge telephone follow-up calls have a limited relationship to hospital readmissions and a short duration of protective effects preventing hospital readmissions. The second explanation is self-selection bias confounds the relationship between discharge telephone follow-up calls and hospital readmissions. Both explanations suggest future research and clinical practice should focus on exploring bundled transitional care interventions as a method to reduce hospital readmissions.