Researchers at the Intermountain Heart Institute have developed a tool that aims to eliminate 30-day hospital readmissions for heart failure patients in part by adding specific information to patients’ electronic health records, Healthcare IT News reports.
Tool Development
To develop the tool — known as the IMRS-HF — researchers examined the EHRs of more than 6,000 heart failure patients discharged from Intermountain Healthcare hospitals between 1999 and 2011.
Researchers then adapted the Intermountain Risk Score, a system used to predict the mortality rates of trauma patients.
Finally, researchers validated the tool by applying it to 459 patients who were hospitalized between April 2011 and October 2012.
How the Tool Works
IMRS-HF combines statistical modeling data into a risk score that tells physicians how likely a patient is to be readmitted to a hospital within 30 days.
The score — which is calculated when a patient is admitted to the hospital — is included in the patient’s EHR, where it is available as an alert to help inform physicians’ treatment decisions (Monegain, Healthcare IT News, 3/11).
Hospitals that used the tool saw a 2.5% decrease in 30-day readmission rates compared with hospitals that did not use the tool, according to a recent Intermountain Healthcare study.
Benefits and Goals of the Tool
Jose Benuzillo — a senior outcomes analyst at Intermountain Healthcare — said, “Use of this tool reduces variation in practice between the most skilled and experienced specialists in cardiovascular care and more general practitioners who see cardiovascular patients more infrequently” (Hall, FierceHealthIT, 3/11).
In a statement, Benjamin Horne — lead researcher and director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at Intermountain Heart Institute — said, “Our next step is to look at ways to integrate this tool into the planning for all of our heart failure patients so we can reduce the number of 30-day readmissions and provide better quality care at a lower cost” (Healthcare IT News, 3/11).
Source: iHealthBeat
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