Fragmented Care for Emergency Surgery Patients Is Associated with Increased Mortality

Continuity of care has been shown to be associated with better outcomes in patients who need readmission after major surgery. To find out if this holds for emergency surgery, these authors used Medicare data to determine the rate of readmission to a different hospital within 30 days of emergency surgery, mortality, and hospital characteristics associated with these readmissions.

Of more than 870,000 patients aged 65 and older who underwent emergency surgery, 12.6% were readmitted within 30 days. Of readmitted patients, 18.6% were readmitted to nonindex hospitals. Mortality was significantly higher for patients readmitted to nonindex hospitals (7.2%) than for those readmitted to the index hospital (5.8%). Index hospital characteristics associ…