Introduction: Hospital admission within 72 hours of emergency discharge is a widely accepted measure of emergency department quality of care. Patients returning for unplanned admission may reveal opportunities for improved emergency or followup care. Calgary emergency physicians, however, are rarely notified of these readmissions. Aggregate site measures provide a high level view of readmissions for managers, but dont allow for timely, individual reflection on practice and learning opportunities. These aggregations may also not correctly account for variation in planned readmissions and other workflow nuances. There was a process in place at one facility to compile and communicate readmission details to each physician, but it was manual, provided limited visit detail, and was done weeks or months following discharge. Methods: A new, realtime 72 hour readmission notification recently implemented within the Calgary Zone provides direct and automated email alerts to all emergency physicians and residents involved in the care of a patient that has been readmitted. This alert is sent within hours of a readmission occurring and contains meaningful visit detail (discharge diagnosis, readmit diagnosis, patient name, etc) to help support practice reflection. An average of 15 alerts per day are generated and have been sent since implementation in April, 2017. Although an old technology, the use of email is a central component of the solution because it allows physicians to receive notifications at home and outside the hospital network where they routinely perform administrative tasks. A secondary notification is sent to personal email accounts (Gmail, Hotmail, etc) to indicate an unplanned admission has occurred, but without visit detail or identifiable information. It also allowed implementation with no new hardware or software cost. Results: A simple thumbs up/down rating system is used to adjust the sensitivity of the alert over time. More than 66% of those providing feedback have indicated the alert is helpful for practice reflection (i.e., thumbs up). And of those that indicated it was not helpful, comments were often entered indicating satisfaction with the alert generally, or suggestions for improvement. For example, consulted admitting physicians are often responsible for discharge decisions and should be added as recipients of the alert. Conclusion: Many physicians have indicated appreciation in knowing about return patients, and that they will reflect on their care, further review the chart, or contact the admitting physician for further discussion. Most are accepting of some ‘expected’ or ‘false positive’ alerts that aren’t helpful for practice reflection. Further tuning and expansion of the alert to specialist and consult services is needed to ensure all physicians involved in a discharge decision are adequately notified.
