Nearly 20% of patients who are discharged from hospitals return for acute care within 30 days, researchers reported Tuesday. The team, led by Yale emergency medicine researcher Dr. Anita A. Vashi, scoured records collected between July 2008 and September 2009 that reported on 4,028,555 patients in California, Florida and Nebraska. They found that 17.9% of hospitalizations resulted in at least one hospital-based "acute care encounter" within 30 days, including readmissions for inpatient care and emergency department visits. Just over 35% of the trips back to the hospital took place in the first seven days after discharge; 57.4% were in the first 14 days.
