Predictors of all-cause 30 day readmission among Medicare patients with type 2 diabetes

AbstractObjective: Readmission is costly among patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) in Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug Plans; identifying high-risk patients is necessary for targeting reduction programs. The objective of this study was to develop a claims-based algorithm to predict all-cause 30 day readmission among patients with T2DM.Methods: This study used administrative data from 1 January 2012 through 31 January 2014. The cohort included hospitalized T2DM patients, aged 18–90 with ≥12 months’ continuous enrollment before an unplanned hospital admission and ≥1 month of enrollment post-discharge, excluding patients in long-term care >30 days pre-index. Multivariate logistic regression predicted the likelihood of readmission following hospitalization in 2013. The analytic file was randomly split into training and test datasets to build and validate the model. Candidate variables included physician and patient demographics, baseline clinical conditions, and healthcare utilization metrics. Clinical c...