Postdischarge Interventions vs. Usual Care in High-Risk Patients: Virtually Identical

The term “virtual ward” describes a care model in which many presumably beneficial elements of inpatient care, such as interprofessional daily team meetings, are applied to outpatient care. To determine whether this model can improve outcomes among recently discharged patients, researchers randomized more than 1900 high-risk general internal medicine patients who were being discharged from one of four Canadian hospitals to either a virtual-ward care model or usual care. Notably, members of the virtual-ward team (case manager, pharmacist, nurse, and physician) had not seen enrolled patients during their hospitalizations. Patients in the virtual-ward group were contacted the day after discharge and received follow-up home visits by a team mem…