Multiple Encounter

Patients may show up in our database repeatedly either during the same hospital stay or at a later time. If they show up at a later time, but soon after the last hospital stay, they may qualify as "readmission", which we report in <in which, monthly, quarterly, annual or all?>

Multiple Encounters

<details> What is the cut-off for continuous stay detection when moving between ICUs and/or wards? E.g. if patient is discharged from one ward at 0800, how late can he arrive at the next ward and still be considered a continuous stay?

What are the fields that have to match to consider two encounters the same patient?

Readmissions

For our purposes, readmissions are admissions of patients who were recorded by our database recently.

ICU Definition

For ICU, a readmission is a patient where

• (admit date/time) - (most recent ICU discharge date/time) <= 72 hours
• is not admitted for planned and scheduled surgery
• might be readmitted from Ward or outside hospital

Discussion

• why are we considering the most recent ICU discharge date/time only?Ttenbergen 11:36, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

Medicine Definition

For medicine, a readmission is a patient where

• (admit date/time) - (most recent discharge date/time) <= 7 days after their most recent discharge time
• is admitted from outside hospital
• (Legacy: planned surgery used to be excluded, but this stopped because of insufficient data when we stopped collecting some APACHE elements in the medicine program <when?>)

Discussion

• is the detection of med readmits for pts discharged from med previously only, or does it include pts who went home directly from ICU?

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