Background: Project IMPACT (Improving Pediatric Patient-Centered Care Transitions) is a multi-center quality improvement collaborative aiming to improve hospital to home transitions. As part of this project, providers attempt to schedule follow-up visits prior to discharge and conduct post-discharge phone calls. Objective: 1.Determine relationship between scheduling post-discharge follow-up visits and 30-day reutilization rates 2. Characterize patients [...]

Background: Post-discharge phone calls to hospitalized patients have been associated with reduced 30-day readmissions.[1,2] But their impact during the COVID-19 pandemic is unknown. Further, whether the 30-day readmission metric is an accurate surrogate for care utilization remains a concern.[3-5] Since 2012, national all-cause readmissions have decreased while emergency department (ED) visits and observation status have [...]

Background: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reimbursement increasingly depends on patient satisfaction scores and readmission rates to incentivize high-quality inpatient hospital care. Providers are continuously implementing complementary interventions to improve patient satisfaction and reduce hospital readmissions. Post-discharge phone calls are a relatively simple intervention to implement that can potentially improve continuity of care [...]

Background: Hospitalization provides an opportunity to provide patients who use tobacco with evidence-based treatment for cessation, including nicotine replacement therapy, motivational interviewing, and pharmacotherapy. However, this benefit is often lost without appropriate transitions in care to outpatient cessation resources. We have found that inpatient tobacco cessation interventions at our 600-bed urban academic medical center do [...]