Frequently Hospitalized Patients’ Perceptions of Factors Contributing to High Hospital Use
BACKGROUND: A small proportion of patients accounts for a large proportion of hospitalizations.
OBJECTIVE: To obtain patients’ perspectives of factors associated with the onset and continuation of high hospital use.
DESIGN: Qualitative research study where a research coordinator conducted one-on-one semi-structured interviews. A team of researchers performed inductive coding and analysis.
SETTING: A single urban academic hospital.
PARTICIPANTS: Patients with two-unplanned 30-day readmissions within 12 months and one or more of the following: ≥1 readmission in the last six months, a referral from a clinician, or ≥3 observation visits.
RESULTS: Overall, 26 participants completed the interviews. Four main themes emerged. First, major medical problems were universal, but the onset of frequent hospital use varied. Second, participants perceived fluctuations in their course to be related to psychological, social, and economic factors. Social support was perceived as helpful and participants benefited when providing social support to others. Third, episodes of illness varied in onset and generally seemed uncontrollable and often unpredictable to the participants. Fourth, participants strongly desired to avoid hospitalization and typically sought care only after self-management failed.
CONCLUSIONS: Emergent themes pointed to factors which influence patients’ onset of high hospital use, fluctuations in their illness over time, and triggers to seek care during an episode of illness. These findings enable patients’ perspectives to be incorporated into the design of programs serving similar populations of frequently hospitalized patients.
© 2019 Society of Hospital Medicine
In recent years, hospitals have made considerable efforts to improve transitions of care, in part due to financial incentives from the Medicare Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP).1 Initially focusing on three medical conditions, the HRRP has been associated with significant reductions in readmission rates.2 Importantly, a small proportion of patients accounts for a very large proportion of hospital readmissions and hospital use.3,4 Frequently hospitalized patients often have multiple chronic conditions and unique needs which may not be met by conventional approaches to healthcare delivery, including those influenced by the HRRP.4-6 In light of this challenge, some hospitals have developed programs specifically focused on frequently hospitalized patients. A recent systematic review of these programs found relatively few studies of high quality, providing only limited insight in designing interventions to support this population.7 Moreover, no studies appear to have incorporated the patients’ perspectives into the design or adaptation of the model. Members of our research team developed and implemented the Complex High Admission Management Program (CHAMP) in January 2016 to address the needs of frequently hospitalized patients in our hospital. To enhance CHAMP and inform the design of programs serving similar populations in other health systems, we sought to identify factors associated with the onset and continuation of high hospital use. Our research question was, from the patients’ perspective, what factors contribute to patients’ becoming and continuing to be high users of hospital care.
METHODS
Setting, Study Design, and Participants
This qualitative study took place at Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH), an 894-bed urban academic hospital located in Chicago, Illinois. Between December 2016 and September 2017, we recruited adult patients admitted to the general medicine services. Eligible participants were identified with the assistance of a daily Northwestern Medicine Electronic Data Warehouse (EDW) search and included patients with two unplanned 30-day inpatient readmissions to NMH within the prior 12 months, in addition to one or more of the following criteria: (1) at least one readmission in the last six months; (2) a referral from one of the patient’s medical providers; or (3) at least three observation visits. We excluded patients whose preferred language was not English and those disoriented to person, place, or time. Considering NMH data showing that approximately one-third of high-utilizer patients have sickle cell disease, we used purposive sampling with the goal to compare findings within and between two groups of participants; those with and those without sickle cell disease. Our study was deemed exempt by the Northwestern University Institutional Review Board.
