If you need to have an operation performed, you hope that once you’re discharged from the hospital, you don’t have to go back. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for some people who suffer complications or require additional treatment.
Recently, researchers took a closer look at what factors drove hospital readmission and total cost after ankle fracture surgery. Below, we take a look at these factors and explain how we work to minimize readmission rates after surgery.
Likelihood of Re-admittance
For their study, researchers at Healio examined nearly 300 patients who underwent open reduction and internal fixation for acute, isolated ankle fractures in order to determine what risk factors increased total costs and unplanned readmission. After examining the data, researchers uncovered that the most common reasons for unplanned hospital readmission were:
- Surgical site infections.
- Not having the surgery performing by an orthopedic surgeon.
- An American Society of Anesthesiologists patient score of 3 or more (health of patient determined on 1-6 scale with 1 being perfectly healthy and 6 being a brain dead patient).
While we can’t control for all the above factors, reducing surgical site infections is very important in our line of work, and the research found that nearly two-thirds of readmissions were due to SSIs. To learn more about how we work hard to prevent surgical site infections, check out this blog post on the subject.
As for factors that drove the total cost of surgery, researchers found that outpatient surgery was more than 33 percent cheaper than inpatient surgeries, on average. Other factors that increased surgical costs were having the operation performed by a podiatry service and being male.