No Effect of a Multimodal Intervention to Lower Hospitalization Rates Among Nursing Home Patients

A substantial proportion of nursing home patients are readmitted to hospitals or sent to emergency departments (EDs), and many of these readmissions and visits are thought to be avoidable. To test whether a structured, multimodal nursing home program lowers hospital admission and ED visit rates, researchers randomized 85 nursing homes with 36,717 residents and no prior exposure to the program to either the intervention group or the usual-care group. The intervention consisted of over 30 clinical, communication, and educational tools to improve care planning and decision making, delineate care paths for common clinical conditions, and facilitate advance planning for patients with terminal illnesses. Usual-care nursing homes received no inter…