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Current efforts to prevent hospital readmissions focus on optimizing care for diagnoses related to initial hospitalizations. Few data are available on the extent to which readmissions are related to comorbid illnesses. To explore this issue, investigators in Boston retrospectively examined diagnoses associated with 10,731 consecutive hospital discharges and 2398 related 30-day readmissions.
The most common readmission diagnoses were cancer (17%), infection (11%), and heart failure (5%). Using a highly reliable algorithm to identify potentially avoidable readmissions, researchers identified infections (specifically, pneumonia, septicemia, and urinary tract infections) as the most common potentially avoidable causes (12%). Among the subset of …