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<\/p>\nWhen resident physicians visit the homes of their former hospital patients they are better able to assess patient needs and understand the important role that community services and agencies play in keeping them at home and out of the hospital, according to a new study by BUSM.<\/p>\n
Resident physicians often develop the discharge plans as part of their training programs. Typically they don\u2019t make a home visit after discharge to assess if the plan worked and many never see their patients again.<\/p>\n
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Thirty-nine internal medicine residents from Boston Medical Center (BMC) participated in a post-hospital discharge home visit to older patients. They were able to review their discharge plan and determine the effectiveness of the plan, specifically identifying parts that did and did not work. \u201cAfter visiting the home, the residents were better able to understand what makes for a good hospital discharge of an older patient,\u201d explained corresponding author Megan Young, MD, assistant professor of Medicine at BUSM.<\/p>\n
After completing the exercise, residents were asked what they learned. These residents were able to better assess patient needs, which highlighted the need for more individualized discharge plans with regard to in-home functioning, communication with caregivers and medication reconciliation.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy being able to go into the patient\u2019s home and see what services patients need (home-delivered meals, grab bars in the shower, medication delivery systems), we as doctors are able to provide more comprehensive care plans that allow community-dwelling older adults to stay in their home and out of the hospital,\u201d said Dr. Young, a geriatrician at BMC.<\/p>\n
Adverse events in older adult patients following discharge from the hospital\u00a0are\u00a0as high as 25 percent. Since the affordable care act and hospital readmissions reduction program, many hospitals get lower payments if they have too many readmissions. \u201cAlthough this study did not look at re-admissions, the goal was to teach residents how to develop comprehensive discharge plans that involved community agencies and resources in the hopes that future patients will have fewer adverse events and readmissions.\u201d<\/p>\n
These findings appear in the journal Gerontology & Geriatrics Education<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thirty-nine internal medicine residents from BMC participated in a post-hospital discharge home visit to older patients, where they were able to review their discharge plan and determine its effectiveness. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12772,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[91,90],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12772"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59898,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59896\/revisions\/59898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}