— Photo for Flickr  by Daquella Manera

Here’s a commentary on a  very important study by a  Yale School of Public Health research team  on what has been learned  so far from national campaigns to reduce hospital readmissions.

It’s a big report.  But we note here that the researchers found that  only one single strategy was “consistently associated with reductions in risk-standardized readmission rates: discharging patients with their follow-up appointments already made, which was associated with a 0.63 percentage point reduction in readmission rates.”

“Still,  hospitals that implemented three or more different strategies had significantly greater reductions in risk-standardized readmission rates than hospitals that implemented less than three strategies.”

“Although introducing three or more strategies compared with fewer strategies was associated with lower rates of unplanned risk-standardized readmission, adding four, five, or six strategies was not associated with significantly more benefit than was attained for those hospitals that implemented three strategies.”