Augmenting a Transitional Care Model With Artificial Intelligence Decreased Readmissions

Evaluate if augmenting a transitions of care delivery model with insights from artificial intelligence (AI) that applied clinical and exogenous social determinants of health data would reduce rehospitalization in older adults.

Retrospective case-control study.

Adult patients discharged from integrated health system between November 1, 2019, and February 31, 2020, and enrolled in a rehospitalization reduction transitional care management program.

An AI algorithm utilizing multiple data sources including clinical, socioeconomic, and behavioral data was developed to predict patients at highest risk for readmitting within 30 days and provide care navigators five care recommendations to prevent rehospitalization.

Adjusted incidence of rehospitalization was estimated with Poisson regression and compared between transitional care management enrollees that used AI insights and matched enrollees for whom AI insights were not used.

Analyses included 6371 hospital encounters between November 2019 and February 2020 across 12 hospitals. Of the encounters 29.3% were identified by AI as being medium-high risk for re-hospitalizing within 30 days, for which AI provided transitional care recommendations to the transitional care management team. The navigation team completed 40.2% of AI recommendations for these high-risk older adults. These patients had overall 21.0% less adjusted incidence of 30-day rehospitalization compared with matched control encounters, or 69 fewer rehospitalizations per 1000 encounters (95% CI 0.65‒0.95).

Coordinating a patient's care continuum is critical for safe and effective transition of care. This study found that augmenting an existing transition of care navigation program with patient insights from AI reduced rehospitalization more than without AI insights. Augmenting transitional care with insights from AI could be a cost-effective intervention to improve transitional care outcomes and reduce unnecessary rehospitalization. Future studies should examine cost-effectiveness of augmenting transitional care models of care with AI when hospitals and post-acute providers partner with AI companies.