Ten years ago, Stephen Jencks, MD, MPH, was hospitalized after taking a nasty spill and rupturing a kidney, breaking two ribs, and fracturing two transverse processes. The independent healthcare safety and quality consultant based in Baltimore still laughs ruefully at what happened next.
Dr. Jencks was stabilized and given OxyContin to treat his considerable pain, and then he was discharged—without his wife or another caregiver present, with a prescription for nothing more than Tylenol, and without any instructions on what to do if his condition worsened. Twelve hours after returning home, his pain re-emerged with such a vengeance that he experienced severe muscle spasms.
Dr. Jencks suspects his doctor was so focused on his ruptured kidney that pain management and follow-up fell by the wayside. “I am not an unassertive individual, so why didn’t I say something?” he asks. “The simple answer is that, at least for me, if I’m taking OxyContin, there are no problems. People tend not to be at the very top of their game when they’re on opioids and traumatized.”
He made it through the night at home and received better pain medication in the morning, but his experience, he says, “beautifully illustrates” the chronic problem of less-than-graceful transfers of care that can lead to unnecessary hospital readmissions. If it nearly happened to him, it can happen to anyone.
And, based on his research, it often does. In an influential 2009 New England Journal of Medicine study coauthored with Mark Williams, MD, FACP, FHM, professor and chief of the division of hospital medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and principal investigator of SHM’s Project BOOST, and Eric Coleman, MD, MPH, FACP, associate professor of medicine and director of the care transitions program at the University of Colorado Denver, Dr. Jencks helped uncover some startling statistics: During a 15-month period from 2003 to 2004, nearly 20% of the roughly 12 million Medicare beneficiaries discharged from hospitals were readmitted within 30 days (see “State-by-State Breakdown of 30-Day Rehospitalizations of Medicare Beneficiaries,” p. 7).1 Of those patients discharged to the community and then rehospitalized, half had not seen their own primary-care physician (PCP) in the interim. In all, the authors estimated Medicare’s financial toll from unplanned rehospitalizations at $17.4 billion for 2004 alone.
Surprisingly, Dr. Jencks’ study and a 2007 Medicare Payment Advisory Commission report to Congress provided the first estimates of the overall burden of rehospitalization in nearly a quarter-century. Since then, however, the topic has been a mainstay in conversations about the kinds of interventions that could yield major improvements in healthcare.
“The thing that has propelled this to the front is the recognition that we really can do better,” Dr. Jencks says. “What had tended to be seen as just an evitable consequence of people being sick is now increasingly seen as often being the consequence of not having done as good a job as we should have.”
