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 monthly, quarterly and annually

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?

Continuous Hospital Stay

The statistician uses data from Admit From & Discharged To, Med Var 1 - Admit-from Ward and Med Var 2 - Discharge-to Ward to

• link profiles from one ward to another when both wards are within the database program
• detect a likely continuous stay when a pt is discharged from one of our wards to a non-collected ward and then re-admitted to one of our wards from the same non-collected ward.

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 to ward or home) <= 72 hours
• is not admitted for planned and scheduled surgery
• might be readmitted from Ward or outside hospital

Medicine Definition

For medicine, a readmission is a patient where

• (admit date/time) - (most recent discharge date/time to the hospital) <= 7 days after their most recent discharge time to the hospital
• 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 Dec 31, 2006)