Hospital discharge summaries affect readmissions, quality of care

The successful transmission of discharge summaries from a hospital to a patient’s doctor is fundamental to ensure quality of care and reduce readmissions, according to a pair of studies published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

The research, conducted at the Yale School of Medicine, involved an analysis of data from the Telemonitoring to Improve Heart Failure Outcomes, a large multicenter study of patients hospitalized with heart failure. This data contained more than 1,500 discharge summaries from 46 U.S. hospitals.

In the first study, the research team expected distribution of summaries to be similar at hospitals they analyzed, but they found wide variation in hospital performance. However, even at the highest-performing hospitals, the quality of discharge summaries was insufficient in terms of timeliness, transmission, and content. In fact, of all hospital studied, none produced high-quality summaries in all domains, according to the study.

The second study looked at whether discharge practices influenced hospital readmissions, and the researchers did find a correlation. Patients whose summaries included useful content or were sent to outside clinicians had lower readmission rates, the study found.

“This study tells us for the first time that it is actually worth spending the time and effort to improve discharge communication, and patients do seem to benefit,” said Leora Horwitz, MD, in a release.