An article in JAMA earlier this month provides support for the importance of early follow up for patients discharged from the hospital following heart failure. The paper was written by Adrian Hernandez FACC, who chairs our Hospital to Home (H2H) Measurement & Evaluation workgroup, and co-authored by AHA President Clyde Yancy FACC and others. In short, it found that Medicare patients discharged from the hospital with higher rates of follow up, as defined as receiving outpatient evaluation within one week of discharge, had lower readmission rates. Not too shocking, right?

ACC’s Hospital to Home has been touting early follow up as one of its ways of reducing readmissions. The easy first lesson of H2H is the importance of seeing the patient within the outpatient setting within one week of discharge. As this study so nicely points out, this could go a long way in reducing readmission rates (talk about bending the cost curve!).

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