The lessons — some obvious — include:
- After discharge, hospitals should minimize care transitions by determining which care settings best suit individual patients’ needs.
- Hospitals can’t continually add to their own discharge-reporting burden, however much insurers and government regulators might want them to!
- Such non-clinical factors as geographic proximity and family resources must be considered later in the discharge process.
- It is too early to commit to predictive over observational discharge-tool structures.
