Support From Hospital to Home for Elders: A Randomized Controlled Study

The investigators will randomize 700 non-psychiatric, non-obstetric, non-surgical patients aged 55 years and older at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) to usual care (ten days of prescription medication, discharge summary sent to primary care provider (PCP), and outpatient appt made for patient, and patient's nurse reviews discharge plan,) or usual care plus a peridischarge intervention (a visit with specialized in-hospital discharge nurse, development of personalized discharge plan, two phone calls from a nurse practitioner(NP)/physician assistant (PA) after discharge and availability of additional calls back from NP/PA, upon patient request, to help answer questions and assist patient's transition to outpatient care, and communication with primary care/subspecialty providers). The usual care and usual care plus intervention groups will be assessed for differences in mortality and rates of rehospitalization and emergency department use 30, 90 and 180 days following discharge from the hospital.

The discharge process from the hospital to home is frequently marked by poor quality and high risk of adverse events and readmissions. It has been hypothesized that better coordinated care, personalized patient education, and follow-up calls to identify potential sources of adverse events, such as medical complications and medication errors can reduce rehospitalization and emergency room visits following discharge from the hospital. Although these interventions have been shown to reduce combined hospital readmissions and emergency department visits in English-speaking patients, none has focused on elderly patients in a diverse urban public hospital setting that includes non-English-speakers, who might benefit more than other populations from enhanced services during and after discharge from the hospital. Further, these labor-intensive interventions are costly to implement, and it is unknown whether opportunity cost of providing additional services in a limited-resource environment such as San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) outweighs the unknown clinical benefits.