Clinical InvestigationCongestive Heart FailurePredicting the risk of unplanned readmission or death within 30 days of discharge after a heart failure hospitalization
Section snippets
Study setting
The province of Alberta has a single-payer, government-funded health care system that provides universal access to over 3.7 million people for hospital, emergency department (ED), and physician services. This study received ethics approval from the Health Ethics Research Board at the University of Alberta.
Data sources
This study used de-identified data from 4 administrative databases maintained by Alberta Health to create our study cohort including (1) the Discharge Abstract Database, which records the
Results
During our study, 59 652 adults in Alberta were discharged after being hospitalized with a diagnosis of HF listed as either the most responsible or a secondary diagnosis. Death or unplanned readmission occurred in about one fifth of patients in the first 30 days after discharge (Table I, Table II), with most of these events being readmissions (and 18.6% of the readmissions were for HF as most responsible diagnosis). Patients who were subsequently readmitted or had died within 30 days of
Discussion
This is the first study to examine the discriminative ability of the CMS-endorsed prediction models and the LACE/LaCE indices in a broad heart failure population and for the composite outcome of “death or unplanned readmission within 30 days of discharge.” Although LACE and LaCE demonstrated only moderate discrimination for predicting 30 day unplanned readmission or death, thereby limiting their use for patient-level prediction, both indices were significantly better able to predict the
Disclosures
Drs McAlister, Kaul, and Ezekowitz receive salary support from Alberta Innovates-Health Solutions and this project was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Pfizer Canada through a peer-reviewed operating grant. The funding agencies did not have input into study design, data collection, interpretation of results, or write up/approval for submission.
Acknowledgements
This study is based in part on data provided by Alberta Health. The interpretation and conclusions contained herein are those of the researchers and do not necessarily represent the views of the Government of Alberta. Neither the Government of Alberta nor Alberta Health express any opinion in relation to this study.
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