Improved outcomes for elderly patients who received care on a transitional care unit.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine whether providing elderly alternate level of care (ALC) patients with interdisciplinary care on a transitional care unit (TCU) achieves better clinical outcomes and lowers costs compared with providing them with standard hospital care. DESIGN: Before-and-after structured retrospective chart audit. SETTING: St Joseph's Hospital in Comox, BC. PARTICIPANTS: One hundred thirty-five consecutively admitted patients aged 70 years and older with ALC designation during 5-month periods before (n = 49) and after (n = 86) the opening of an on-site TCU. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Length of stay, discharge disposition, complications of the acute and ALC portions of the patients' hospital stays, activities of daily living (mobility, transfers, and urinary continence), psychotropic medications and vitamin D prescriptions, and ALC patient care costs, as well as annual hospital savings, were examined. RESULTS: Among the 86 ALC patients receiving care during the postintervention period, 57 (66%) were admitted to the TCU; 29 of the 86 (34%) patients in the postintervention group received standard care (SC). All 86 ALC patients in the postintervention group were compared with the 49 preintervention ALC patients who received SC. Length of stay reduction occurred among the postintervention group during the acute portion of the hospital stay (14.0 days postintervention group vs 22.5 days preintervention group; P < .01). Discharge home or to an assisted-living facility increased among the postintervention group (30% postintervention group vs 12% preintervention group; P < .01). Patients' ability to transfer improved among the postintervention group (55% postintervention group vs 14% preintervention group; P < .01). At discharge, 48% of ALC patients in the postintervention group were able to transfer independently compared with 17% of ALC patients in the preintervention group. Hospital-acquired infections among the postintervention group decreased during the acute phase (14% postintervention group vs 33% preintervention group; P < .01) and in the ALC phase of hospital stay (16% postintervention group vs 31% preintervention group; P = .011). Antipsychotic prescriptions decreased among the postintervention group (45% postintervention group vs 66% preintervention group; P = .026). Despite greater use of rehabilitation services, TCU costs per patient were lower ($155/d postintervention period vs $273/d preintervention period). CONCLUSION: Elderly ALC patients experienced improvements in health and function at reduced cost after the creation of an interdisciplinary TCU, to which most of the nonpalliative ALC patients were transferred. Although all the postintervention ALC patients (those admitted to the TCU and those who received SC) were analyzed together, it is very likely that the greatest gains were made in the ALC patients who received care in the TCU.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".