Hospital readmissions: physician awareness and communication practices.
Hospital readmissions are garnering increased attention as a potential measure of care transition quality. When readmissions occur, providing feedback to the team that originally discharged the patient could be valuable. This study, conducted at two academic medical centers, found that discharging physicians frequently were not informed that their patient had been readmitted. Communication between discharging and readmitting teams took place in a minority of cases, even though most clinicians felt that communication would have been useful. A recent AHRQ WebM&M perspective discussed hospital readmissions as well as methods to reduce them, including use of a transitions coach.