Background: Telephone call programs are a common intervention used to improve patients' transition to outpatient care after hospital discharge.
Objective: To examine the impact of a follow-up telephone call program as a readmission reduction initiative.
Research design: Pragmatic randomized controlled real-world effectiveness trial.
Subjects: We enrolled and randomized all patients discharged home from a hospital general medicine service to a follow-up telephone call program or usual care discharge. Patients discharged against medical advice were excluded. The intervention was a hospital program, delivering a semistructured follow-up telephone call from a nurse within 3-7 days of discharge, designed to assess understanding and provide education, and assistance to support discharge plan implementation.
Measures: Our primary endpoint was hospital inpatient readmission within 30 days identified by the electronic health record. Secondary endpoints included observation readmission, emergency department revisit, and mortality within 30 days, and patient experience ratings.
Results: All 3054 patients discharged home were enrolled and randomized to the telephone call program (n=1534) or usual care discharge (n=1520). Using a prespecified intention-to-treat analysis, we found no evidence supporting differences in 30-day inpatient readmissions [14.9% vs. 15.3%; difference -0.4 (95% confidence interval, 95% CI), -2.9 to 2.1; P=0.76], observation readmissions [3.8% vs. 3.6%; difference 0.2 (95% CI, -1.1 to 1.6); P=0.74], emergency department revisits [6.1% vs. 5.4%; difference 0.7 (95% CI, -1.0 to 2.3); P=0.43], or mortality [4.4% vs. 4.9%; difference -0.5 (95% CI, -2.0 to 1.0); P=0.51] between telephone call and usual care groups.
Conclusions: We found no evidence of an impact on 30-day readmissions or mortality due to the postdischarge telephone call program.
Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03050918.