A Systematic Review of Interventions to Improve Nursing Home to Emergency Department Care Transitions

This study aimed to identify interventions that are effective in improving the transitions of care for patients from nursing homes (NHs) to emergency departments (EDs). A total of 607 studies were identified, from which 19 studies were included for full-text review. Nine pre-post intervention studies and two retrospective cohort studies met all criteria for inclusion. In the quality assessment, two (18.2%) were assessed as good quality; seven (63.6%) were fair; and two (18.2%) were poor. Nine studies (81.2%) had a severe risk of bias, primarily due to confounding and deviation from the intended intervention. Pre-post intervention studies utilized transfer checklists/forms, web-based communication networks, and multimodal approaches to improve transitions of care. Eight studies reported significant improvement in critical NH-ED transfer information completeness after intervention implementation. Three studies assessed health care utilization after intervention implementation with two studies reporting no reduction in utilization and one study reporting decreased 30-day hospital readmission and ED revisit rates. Studies evaluating patient-centered outcomes, such as whether interventions reduced harm to patients by decreasing medical errors, hospital length of stay, or the overall number of facility transfers, are needed.