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A new service piloted at Penn Medicine allowed a proportion of patients to avoid hospitalization by providing them with greater support after visiting the emergency department. The vast majority of the patients enrolled in the service - nearly 9 out of 10 - did not need to return to the hospital for care in the month that followed their initial visit. The study was published in
Healthcare.
"The culture is shifting where we realize that hospitalization is not always the best option for patients - particularly patients with chronic illness," said one of the study's lead authors, Austin Kilaru, MD, an emergency physician at Penn Medicine. "We need to find better ways of helping patients not just get healthy in a hospital, but stay healthy at home - whenever they are ready to be there."