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The cost and effect of patient discharge education
Submit responseThe recent article by Jack and colleagues (1) reported that their Reengineered Hospital Discharge Program (RED) decreased re-hospitalization. Many of discharge plan depends nurses do the majority task, but the article present a different way to do follow up education. The results include time and cost analyses were also very impressive. Here I want to share my experience. I myself had done a similar simple investigation about consultancy phone call cost for different purpose. In 2005, nurses in our hospital still had to trace all patients one week after discharge by the policy established during SARS breaking out. We counted the phone call time and staff cost. The result was used to pursue the administrator to increase members of staff or to trace the high risk patients only. After showing the data, we change the policy to only offer the high risk patients phone call. The discussion part of the article indicated an important challenge for programs like RED is that health providers may have no financial incentive to do so. This is a very real issue. In the medical economical subject, we clearly knew that many programs are effective, but in cost this checkpoint still need more immediate and detail evidence to support any investment of program. I think we should cooperate with medical economist on related issue. In the future, along with the progress of network information and the growth of people's health knowledge, the discharge education and consult of those patients will also present the different change. This article remind us should attempt to study the cost-related factors among the research project, includes the cost as research indicators in the future.
References
1. Brian W. Jack, Veerappa K. Chetty, David Anthony, Jeffrey L. Greenwald, Gail M. Sanchez, Anna E. Johnson, Shaula R. Forsythe, Julie K. O'Donnell, Michael K. Paasche-Orlow, Christopher Manasseh, Stephen Martin, and Larry Culpepper A Reengineered Hospital Discharge Program to Decrease Rehospitalization: A Randomized Trial Ann Intern Med 2009; 150: 178-187
Conflict of Interest:
None declared