Preventing potentially avoidable readmissions in a general internal medicine division by improving the timeliness of discharge summaries

Evidence shows that exceeding delay in discharge summary (DS) dissemination can have an impact on patients' outcome such as unplanned readmissions, especially among complex patients. To decrease median delay for DS dissemination in our general internal medicine division, the process to produce the DS was completely reengineered using the electronic patient record. Results showed a decrease of 3.20 day for DS dissemination. Concomitantly the potentially avoidable readmission rate within 30 days for patients discharged to home showed a decrease of 2.00 % to reach 7.79%, being in the tolerance interval for the expected rate, whereas it was outside of the tolerance interval before the reengineered process.