BACKGROUND: The population health inpatient Medicare Advantage pharmacist (PHIMAP) intervention is a pharmacist-led, transitions-of-care intervention that aims to reduce hospital readmissions among Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. PHIMAP includes inpatient pharmacist participation in interdisciplinary rounds, admission and discharge medication reconciliation, pharmacy staff delivery of discharge medications to the bedside, personalized discharge medication lists and counseling, and communication with outpatient pharmacists through an electronic health record. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effect of the PHIMAP intervention on unplanned 30-day same-hospital readmissions among Medicare Advantage patients. METHODS: Those included were patients admitted to a large urban academic medical center between May 2018 and March 2020 who had a Medicare Advantage plan and were aged at least 18 years. A 2-group, quasi-experimental design was utilized. Control patients received the usual care, which included a best possible medication history and a postdischarge phone call. A multivariable logistic regression model was estimated to predict unplanned 30-day same-hospital readmissions. This study was a Hypothesis Evaluating Treatment Effectiveness study. RESULTS: In total, 884 patients were included. The majority were White (59.0%), non-Hispanic (87.7%), English speaking (90.5%), and older adults (median age, 75 years; interquartile range, 70-83 years). We detected no statistically significant association between the PHIMAP intervention and unplanned 30-day same-hospital readmissions (odds ratio [OR] = 0.91, 95% CI = 0.56-1.52). After adjusting for patient demographics and clinical covariates, significant predictors of 30-day readmissions included the number of emergency department/inpatient visits within 180 days prior to index admission (OR = 1.40, 95% CI = 1.11-1.77); discharge to a post-acute care facility, such as an inpatient rehabilitation facility, long-term acute care facility, or skilled nursing facility (OR = 1.69, 95% CI = 1.06-2.66); hospital length of stay in days (OR = 1.04, 95% CI=1.01-1.07); and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Elixhauser Comorbidity Index score (OR = 1.01, 95% CI = 1.01-1.02). CONCLUSIONS: Significant predictors of readmissions among Medicare Advantage beneficiaries were consistent with greater illness severity, including a recent history of prior hospital utilization, a discharge to post-acute care facility (vs home), a longer length of hospital stay, and a higher comorbidity burden. Although we detected no statistically significant association between PHIMAP and unplanned 30-day same-hospital readmissions, differences in study group assignment based on the day of hospital discharge (weekend vs weekday) was a noted limitation of this study. Future studies of inpatient pharmacist-led interventions should plan to minimize the risk of selection bias due to differences in the time of patient discharge. DISCLOSURES: This study was supported in part by the National Institute on Aging under award number R01AG058911 (to Pevnick) and the UCLA Clinical Translational Science Institute (UL1 TR001881). The sponsor had no role in the design and conduct of the study, nor the writing of this report.

BACKGROUND: Incident reporting is widely used in hospitals to improve patient safety, but current reporting systems do not function optimally. The utility of incident reports is limited because hospital staff may not know what to report, may fear retaliation, and may doubt whether administrators will review reports and respond effectively. METHODS: This is a clustered randomized controlled trial of the Safety Action Feedback and Engagement (SAFE) Loop, an intervention designed to transform hospital incident reporting systems into effective tools for improving patient safety. The SAFE Loop has six key attributes: obtaining nurses input about which safety problems to prioritize on their unit; focusing on learning about selected high-priority events; training nurses to write more informative event reports; prompting nurses to report high-priority events; integrating information about events from multiple sources; and providing feedback to nurses on findings and mitigation plans. The study will focus on medication errors and randomize 20 nursing units at a large academic/community hospital in Los Angeles. Outcomes include: (1) incident reporting practices (rates of high-priority reports, contributing factors described in reports), (2) nurses attitudes toward incident reporting, and (3) rates of high-priority events. Quantitative analyses will compare changes in outcomes pre- and post-implementation between the intervention and control nursing units, and qualitative analyses will explore nurses experiences with implementation. CONCLUSION: If effective, SAFE Loop will have several benefits: increasing nurses engagement with reporting, producing more informative reports, enabling safety leaders to understand problems, designing system-based solutions more effectively, and lowering rates of high-priority patient safety events.

Objectives

Geriatric guidelines strongly recommend avoiding benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepine sedative hypnotics in older adults. Hospitalisation may provide an important opportunity to begin the process of deprescribing these medications, particularly as new contraindications arise. We used implementation science models and qualitative interviews to describe barriers and facilitators to deprescribing benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepine sedative hypnotics in the hospital and develop potential interventions to address identified barriers.

Design

We used two implementation science models, the Capability, Opportunity and Behaviour Model (COM-B) and the Theoretical Domains Framework, to code interviews with hospital staff, and an implementation process, the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW), to codevelop potential interventions with stakeholders from each clinician group.

Setting

Interviews took place in a tertiary, 886-bed hospital located in Los Angeles, California.

Participants

Interview participants included physicians, pharmacists, pharmacist technicians, and nurses.

Results

We interviewed 14 clinicians. We found barriers and facilitators across all COM-B model domains. Barriers included lack of knowledge about how to engage in complex conversations about deprescribing (capability), competing tasks in the inpatient setting (opportunity), high levels of resistance/anxiety among patients to deprescribe (motivation), concerns about lack of postdischarge follow-up (motivation). Facilitators included high levels of knowledge about the risks of these medications (capability), regular rounds and huddles to identify inappropriate medications (opportunity) and beliefs that patients may be more receptive to deprescribing if the medication is related to the reason for hospitalisation (motivation). Potential modes of delivery included a seminar aimed at addressing capability and motivation barriers in nurses, a pharmacist-led deprescribing initiative using risk stratification to identify and target patients at highest need for deprescribing, and the use of evidence-based deprescribing education materials provided to patients at discharge.

Conclusions

While we identified numerous barriers and facilitators to initiating deprescribing conversations in the hospital, nurse- and pharmacist-led interventions may be an appropriate opportunity to initiate deprescribing.

Background

Older adults commonly face challenges in understanding, obtaining, administering, and monitoring medication regimens after hospitalization. These difficulties can lead to avoidable morbidity, mortality, and hospital readmissions. Pharmacist-led peri-discharge interventions can reduce adverse drug events, but few large randomized trials have examined their effectiveness in reducing readmissions. Demonstrating reductions in 30-day readmissions can make a financial case for implementing pharmacist-led programs across hospitals.

Methods/design

The PHARMacist Discharge Care, or the PHARM-DC intervention, includes medication reconciliation at admission and discharge, medication review, increased communication with caregivers, providers, and retail pharmacies, and patient education and counseling during and after discharge. The intervention is being implemented in two large hospitals: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the Brigham and Women's Hospital. To evaluate the intervention, we are using a pragmatic, randomized clinical trial design with randomization at the patient level. The primary outcome is utilization within 30 days of hospital discharge, including unforeseen emergency department visits, observation stays, and readmissions. Randomizing 9776 patients will achieve 80% power to detect an absolute reduction of 2.5% from an estimated baseline rate of 27.5%. Qualitative analysis will use interviews with key stakeholders to study barriers to and facilitators of implementing PHARM-DC. A cost-effectiveness analysis using a time-and-motion study to estimate time spent on the intervention will highlight the potential cost savings per readmission.

Discussion

If this trial demonstrates a business case for the PHARM-DC intervention, with few barriers to implementation, hospitals may be much more likely to adopt pharmacist-led peri-discharge medication management programs.

Trial registration

ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04071951.