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His wife assured me he was the life of the party, the kind of guy “you pay to stop talking.” But her description only added to the concerns I had about my patient, a drowsy older man with gnawing abdominal pain. He listlessly told me he had noticed his stool was darker than usual, a sign of bleeding from the G.I. tract “Doc,” he could barely get the words out, “I didn’t think nothing of it till I started feeling woozy. Then I thought a lot of it.”
As a medical resident, a doctor-in-training who leads much of the day-to-day patient care in the hospital, I’m among the first to see patients. Along with my team, I assume the bulk of the logistical duties of admitting new patients – interviewing them and their families, writing orders, calling consultants, scheduling appointments and responding to sudden changes in their clinical condition. When I started residency, I personally carried out most of these tasks. Now, as I progress in my training, I’m increasingly supervising younger residents doing them.
For this patient, our team immediately stopped any home medications that could further lower his blood pressure — in his case Lasix, a “water pill” that removes extra fluid in patients with heart failure. We rushed him to the endoscopy suite, where doctors placed a clip on the site of the bleeding. I was impressed with how rapidly he recovered. His wife, it turned out, was right. He did talk, a lot. I even took a small measure of satisfaction at my quick recognition and management of his condition. Victory.
Not quite. The patient was feeling better and insisted on being discharged, though we had hoped to monitor him in the hospital for another day or so before resuming his medications. Together, we decided it would be O.K. for him to leave, provided he saw his primary care doctor in a few days to restart his medications at the right doses.
I completed the discharge summary, and the patient went home. But he skipped the follow-up appointment. He still hadn’t started his water pill when he finally saw his doctor a week later. By then, fluid had accumulated in his lungs, his breathing had grown labored and I got the dreaded ping on my cellphone: “your patient has been readmitted.”
When we’re notified a patient we discharged has been readmitted, it’s generally a mark of shame, generating a sense that we failed to do enough to restore our patients to good health. But discharging a patient from the hospital is among the most difficult and dangerous aspects of providing medical care. It’s a tumultuous time, when the results of many lab tests may still be pending, medication regimens have been disrupted, and the doctors in charge are often left speculating about whether a patient is truly ready to leave. In the meantime, most patients who are feeling better just want to go home – and they let us know.
One-fifth of Medicare beneficiaries are readmitted within 30 days of discharge, and one-third are readmitted within 90 days. One study found that 20 percent of patients have a complication within three weeks of leaving the hospital — more than half of which could have been prevented or ameliorated. Thankfully most complications are minor, but some can be serious, leading to permanent disability or death. All told, Medicare spends $26 billion annually on readmissions, $17 billion of which is for readmissions that are considered preventable.
Issues crop up after discharge for many reasons. One factor is the process we use to admit versus discharge patients. In teaching hospitals, a junior resident — a year or two out of medical school — typically spends hours interviewing a patient, gathering information and developing a plan. He or she might then discuss the plan with more senior residents before ultimately presenting the case to the attending physician in charge. Together, they all examine the patient and settle on a plan, which is updated every day.
Contrast this with the discharge process. Ideally, it begins at admission through discussions with case managers and family members. But there’s often a rush toward the end of hospitalization — when a patient wants to leave or a rehab bed opens up — leading to a haphazard set of final conversations, appointments and prescriptions. And because the exact time of discharge is uncertain, the doctor discharging a patient may not be the one who knows the patient best.
It’s also often not clear exactly when a patient should be discharged. There’s no green light that turns on when a patient recovers or crystal ball that predicts what will happen afterward. In the hospital, we constantly monitor a patient’s vital signs, blood tests and clinical condition. But after hospitalization, patients live in a very different environment — and there’s tremendous uncertainty in that transition. Sometimes the difference between discharge today versus tomorrow is a more frustrated patient and higher medical costs. Sometimes it’s a devastating complication that hasn’t yet declared itself.
As patients recover from their immediate illness, the remaining diagnostics and treatments are often completed after discharge. But this is where we struggle most. Research suggests direct communication between hospital doctors and primary care doctors occurs infrequently and that discharge summaries — detailed records of a patient’s hospital course — are often unavailable at a patient’s first post-hospital visit. Almost 30 percent of patients are discharged with a plan to continue workups after hospitalization, but more than one-third of these are never completed. Similarly, more than 40 percent of patients have lab tests pending at the time of discharge — with 10 percent requiring action—but most physicians remain unaware of them.
There are steps that patients, doctors and hospitals can take to improve the transition from hospital to community — and we’re starting to make progress. Post-discharge phone calls, nurse-led discharge planning, visiting nurses, and dedicated “transition coaches” have all been shown to lower readmission rates. Pharmacists reviewing medications with patients can reduce drug-related complications. Ensuring high-risk patients see doctorswithin a week of discharge can prevent readmissions. Moving forward, greater use of telemedicine and dedicated post-hospital discharge clinics or specialists will be part of the solution.
More seamless transitions from hospital to clinic require recognizing that our responsibilities to patients continue, and sometimes increase, when they leave us. Like many of medicine’s important but often overlooked areas — prevention, screening, care coordination — discharge planning is not widely celebrated. But for patients hoping to stay out of the hospital, it may be what matters most.
Dhruv Khullar, M.D., M.P.P. is a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Follow him on Twitter: @DhruvKhullar.
Source: The New York Times