A new study has confirmed that patients who come to the emergency room after a recent hospital stay are more than two times more likely to be readmitted than patients who have not recently spent time in the hospital.
The new research was conducted at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and was presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine.
“Patients who return to the emergency department within seven days of hospitalization have both relatively high and increasing rates of readmission,” says Zachary F. Meisel, MD, MPH, MSc, an emergency physician and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. “These findings are important because they come at a time when there is a great effort underway to reduce hospital re-admission rates, and they give us clues about how emergency departments can play a role in that process.”
Josyann Abisaab, MD, is an emergency room physician at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.
