Reducing Readmissions for the MI Patient with Early Access to Multidisciplinary Team Care

Background An acute myocardial infarction (MI) or heart attack occurs in approximately 735,000 Americans each year accounting for 1 in 4 deaths of all heart-related events. Hospital readmissions within the first 30 days of discharge occur in 11% of patients resulting in a mean cost of $22,000 per admission. While there is vulnerability among this population for readmission to the hospital there was no evidence that programs with timely access to care exist. This scholarly project addresses the question of outcomes of an early post-discharge multidisciplinary intervention to reduce readmission in this post MI population at an academic health center.
Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine whether early access to a multidisciplinary MI clinic (MDMI) following discharge for an acute myocardial infarction reduces readmission rates within 30 days following discharge.
Design The design was a retrospective descriptive comparative study of patients who were discharged with the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction. Study data was obtained from patient chart review.
Methods The data for this study was drawn from the electronic medical records (EMR) of patients discharged with a documented primary or secondary diagnosis of an acute myocardial infarction to any setting from January 1, 2016 through May 31, 2016.
Results Of the 307 patients discharged with an acute MI within the six month time frame, 88 (29%) attended the MDMI clinic with a readmission rate of 5.7% as compared to the treatment as usual group of 219 (71%) that had a readmission rate of 14.6%.
Conclusions The decreased readmission rate in the patients seen in the MDMI clinic suggests there is evidence that the readmission of patients seen in clinic differed from the readmission rate