A Survey on Factors Contributing to Hospital Patient Readmission

Patient readmission is an important criterion in performance evaluation of healthcare settings. Identifying the causes of the readmissions would help the policymakers in designing strategies for efficient management of health facilities. This stud aimed to explore factors contributing to readmission by sampling from an Iranian hospital. Clinical records of 385 patients who had at least one readmission in the hospital during the period of four months were reviewed, retrospectively. Patients’ demographic data, physicians’ information, and the factors related to readmission were extracted from the clinical records. Common factors contributing to readmission were identified by literature review and were grouped into five major categories. Chi-square test was used to determine the relationship between the nominal variables. The main cause of patient readmission was found to be medical checkup (37.2%), followed by disease complications (15.9%) and surgery complications (12.2%). Moreover, frequency distribution of readmissions were significantly different concerning the background variables including insurance coverage, duration of hospitalization, sex, place of residence, and way of discharge. Furthermore, the frequencies of the five reasons of patient readmission were significantly related to sex, insurance coverage, duration of hospitalization, nature of treatment, and type of discharge were identified. No significant relationship was found between patients’ place of residence and readmission causes. The fact that readmission rate is influenced by multiple factors highlights the need for development of systems approaches to alleviating the rate of unnecessary readmission of patient to health facilities.