Obviously patients do not want to spend a lot of time recovering in a hospital. Most patients would like to spend only the necessary amount of time in a hospital to recover, then return home and resume their normal lives, rather than having to frequently return to the hospital. The recovery process for heart failures—and most other ailments–in hospitals is not as simple as get in, get better, and get out. There is a whole other side of the process that essentially determines a patient’s probability for having to be readmitted to the hospital at a later time.
Whenever a patient is released from a hospital, a discharge summary must be made. A discharge summary, in essence, provides a summary of the patient’s stay including the procedures/treatments provided by the hospital, instructions/rehabilitation orders, medication lists, test results, etc. Basically, anything that is pertinent to the patient’s recovery from his/her health issue while at the hospital is included in the discharge summary.
Leora Horwitz, M.D., lead researcher and author of the study, Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, has said that for a discharge summary to be useful in reducing hospital readmission rates, it must follow three key points: it needs to be timely, it has to be sent to the outside physician, and it has to include all pertinent information. “All three need to be present in order for it to do its job.”
Horwitz, and her team from Yale School of Medicine, conducted a study using data from Tele-HF (a multicenter study of patients hospitalized with heart failure). They were able to analyze over 1,500 discharge summaries from 46 hospitals across the U.S.
In their first study, they found that hospitals largely varied in terms of discharge summary quality. Some hospital discharge summaries were inadequate in terms of timeliness, while others were insufficient in terms of content. Overall, no hospital in the study consistently produced high-quality discharge summaries in accordance to all three of Horwitz’s points.
In their second study, Horwitz’s team looked at the effect of improving hospital discharge summaries on the amount of hospital re-admissions. This study did, in fact, provide positive causal evidence that a quality and timely discharge summary can decrease a patient’s chances of having to return to the hospital.
This showed the researchers, and hopefully hospitals around the world, that providing high-quality discharge summaries are worth the time in order to benefit patients the most.
