Assessing Patient Readiness for Hospital Discharge, Discharge Communication, and Transitional Care Management.

Abstract

Background: Discharge communication between hospitalists and primary care clinicians is essential to improve care coordination, minimize adverse events, and decrease unplanned health services use. Health-related social needs are key drivers of health, and hospitalists and primary care clinicians value communicating social needs at discharge.

Objective: To 1) characterize the current state of discharge communications between an academic medical center hospital and primary care clinicians at associated clinics; 2) seek feedback about the potential usefulness of discharge readiness information to primary care clinicians.

Design: Exploratory, convergent mixed methods.

Participants: Primary care clinicians from Family Medicine and General Internal Medicine of an academic medical center in the US Intermountain West.

Approach: Literature-informed REDCap survey. Semistructured interview guide developed with key informants, grounded in current literature. Survey data were descriptively summarized; interview data were deductively and inductively coded, organized by topics.

Results: Two key topics emerged: 1) discharge communication, with interrelated topics of transitional care management and follow-up appointment challenges, and recommendations for improving discharge communication; and 2) usefulness of the discharge readiness information, included interrelated topics related to lack of shared understanding about roles and responsibilities across settings and ethical concerns related to identifying problems that may not have solutions.

Conclusions: While reiterating perennial discharge communication and transitional care management challenges, this study reveals new evidence about how these issues are interrelated with assessing and responding to patients' lack of readiness for discharge and unmet social needs during care transitions. Primary care clinicians had mixed views on the usefulness of discharge readiness information. We offer recommendations for improving discharge communication and transitional care management (TCM) processes, which may be applicable in other care settings.