In response to increasing scrutiny of hospital readmission rates, healthcare stakeholder organizations in South Carolina launched a statewide quality improvement learning collaborative called Preventing Avoidable Readmissions Together. The results of the collaborative — which proved promising — were recently published in the journal Population Health Management.
Participating in the PART initiative were acute care hospitals, as well as home health organizations, nursing facilities, hospices and other healthcare organizations. To measure the success of PART, a team of researchers analyzed statewide participation, curricular engagement and adoption of evidence-based improvement strategies.
Most importantly, the researchers analyzed unadjusted 30-day all-cause hospital readmission rates from calendar year 2011 (the final full year before PART) to 2013 (the first full year of PART). For comparison across time periods, rate changes from an earlier time period, 2009 to 2011, also were analyzed.
Highlighted below are five takeaways from the study.
1. All total, 59 out of 64 (92 percent) of the state's acute care hospitals and nine out of 10 hospital systems participated in collaborative events, including webinars and coaching calls, statewide in-person meetings, regional in-person meetings and individualized consultations.
2. In addition to acute care hospitals, three long-term hospitals, 12 rehabilitation facilities and 40 skilled nursing facilities participated in the collaborative.
3. Among 34 (58 percent) of the participating hospitals that completed a survey at the completion of the first year of the program, respondents had completely implemented multidisciplinary rounding (58 percent), post-discharge telephone calls (58 percent) and teach-back (32 percent).
4. The year 1 survey also revealed the hospitals were in the process of implementing high-quality transition records (52 percent), improved discharge summaries (45 percent) and timely follow-up appointments (39 percent).
5. Between 2011 and 2013, a higher proportion of hospitals had significant decreases in all-cause readmission rates compared to trends between 2009 and 2011 for acute myocardial infarction (55.6 percent vs. 30.4 percent), heart failure (54.2 percent vs. 31.7 percent) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (41.7 percent vs. 33.3 percent).
"The South Carolina PART learning collaborative has successfully engaged key partners in care transitions efforts on a statewide level while garnering high participation rates from different healthcare organizations," concluded the research team.
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