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News: Study says 40 percent of inpatients return to hospital within 2 years

Case Management Weekly, June 2, 2010

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A new study conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) found that two out of every five patients who sought acute hospital care from January 2006 to December 2007 in selected states made multiple visits to the hospital during the two-year period.

The AHRQ analyzed data from 12 participating states, 27.8 million inpatient stays for 15.1 million patients.

The AHRQ study is unique because it includes patients who sought emergency department treatment as well as those who received inpatient care. “Most readmission studies only report information on patients who have multiple hospital inpatient stays," the AHRQ report says.

Highlights of the study include:

• More than a quarter of patients with an inpatient hospital stay in the selected states had multiple inpatient hospitalizations during the two-year period.
• Factoring in ED visits increased the rate of multiple visits by more than a third, from an average of 1.5 inpatient readmissions to 2.1 hospital visits per patient.
• Medicare patients had the highest inpatient readmission rates (1.9 visits per Medicare patient) while Medicaid patients had the highest ED revisit rates (2.5 visits per Medicaid patient).
• Patients living in the poorest communities had 26.5 percent higher hospital revisit rates compared with patients from the wealthiest areas.

Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

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