Telehealth transitional care and 30-day readmission during the COVID-19 pandemic

Transitional care management (TCM) services after hospital discharge are critical for continuity of care, and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to telehealth modes of delivery. This study examined the shift from face-to-face to telehealth care around the start of the pandemic (April-July 2020) compared with the same months in 2019 and 2021 and the corresponding 30-day readmission rates. We compared the rates of face-to-face and telehealth TCM as well as face-to-face and telehealth non-TCM services and observed a dramatic shift to telehealth in 2020 with a slight drop-off in 2021. For TCM services specifically, face-to-face visits made up nearly 90% of visits in 2019, whereas telehealth made up the vast majority in 2020 and 2021 at 97.5% and 84.9%, respectively. Over the same time periods, 30-day readmission rates remained steady at 10% along with no changes in 30-day mortality. Among those who completed TCM visits, 30-day readmission rates remained between 8% and 9% and 30-day mortality remained below 1%. These data indicate that this dramatic systemwide shift from face-to-face to telehealth TCM was not accompanied by concurrent changes in either 30-day readmission or mortality rates. Although the findings may be subject to ecologic bias, the data at hand did not allow for reliable estimation of differences in effects of patient-level service delivery type on readmission risk or mortality due to the extremely low volume of face-to-face visits during the pandemic periods. Future research would be needed to conduct such comparisons.