While 1 in 5 pediatric epilepsy readmissions were scheduled, an additional 20% were judged to be preventable, according to a new report.
An interdisciplinary team from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center was established to review and characterize 30-day readmissions from patients admitted for epilepsy between May 2014 and October 2016. The team was made up of inpatient and outpatient neuroscience nurses, care managers, a quality outcomes manager, and child neurology physicians who individually reviewed the data.
“There was no prior data of this sort, so we were not sure what we were going to find when we started the study,” study author Marissa Vawter-Lee, MD told MD Magazine®. Other studies had found that pediatric epilepsy readmission rates hovered around 6-10% but they did not describe the readmitted patients.
The investigators classified 21.5% of the readmissions as “preventable” and 64.9% as not preventable. The most common preventable causes for readmissions were problems with the discharge care plan or medication management, the study authors said.