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Hospital discharge is a precarious time for patients, especially now given the higher acuity of illness and emphasis on reducing length of stay. Interventions such as discharge advocates or transition coaches, introduced to reduce healthcare utilization and improve patient safety, have yielded mixed results. Now, researchers have explored the use of a “discharge facilitator” (DF) — a nurse practitioner with prior inpatient medicine experience.
This trial was conducted during a 5-month period on an academic medical service at an urban medical center. A DF was randomly assigned to one of five resident medical teams; a similar resident team, on a different floor, served as the control. The DF performed medication reconciliation, wrote prescript…