Hospital readmission
Quality Management
Definition. A hospital readmission is an unplanned return to hospital within a set period, commonly 30 days, after discharge.
Explanation
Medicare data showed that about one in five beneficiaries was rehospitalised within 30 days (Jencks et al., 2009). Readmission became a quality and payment indicator, and electronic record data have been used to build automated risk models for heart failure patients (Amarasingham et al., 2010).
Effective discharge planning, with clear components agreed through Delphi methods, is a key prevention strategy (Yam et al., 2012).
Related concepts
Length of stay Patient flow Quality indicator Machine learning Clinical handover
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References
Amarasingham, R., Moore, B. J., Tabak, Y. P., Drazner, M. H., Clark, C. A., Zhang, S., Reed, W. G., Swanson, T. S., Ma, Y., & Halm, E. A. (2010). An automated model to identify heart failure patients at risk for 30-day readmission or death using electronic medical record data. Medical Care, 48 (11), 981–988. https://doi.org/10.1097/MLR.0b013e3181ef60d9
Jencks, S. F., Williams, M. V., & Coleman, E. A. (2009). Rehospitalizations among patients in the Medicare fee-for-service program. New England Journal of Medicine, 360(14), 1418–1428. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa0803563
Yam, C. H. K., Wong, E. L. Y., Cheung, A. W. L., Chan, F. W. K., Wong, F. Y. Y., & Yeoh, E.-K. (2012). Framework and components for effective discharge planning system: a delphi methodology. BMC Health Services Research, 12 (1), 396. https://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/12/396
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Hospital readmission. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/hospital-readmission/
Articles that discuss this concept
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