Post-Discharge Transitional Care Program and Patient Compliance With Follow-Up Activities

We explore whether the frequency of post-hospital discharge transitional care calls affects patients’ adherence to their discharge plans. We reviewed 1,000 call records of a post-discharge transitional care program run by a large U.S. tertiary care hospital in 2018–2019 and generated binary outcomes capturing patient self-reports of (1) scheduling or completing follow-up appointments, procedures, or prescription fills, (2) missing a scheduled event, and (3) reporting a new adverse clinical event. Our predictor variables captured callers’ success in completing the first and each subsequent call with discharged patients. We ran linear probability models (LPM) for each binary outcome after controlling for sociodemographic and clinical characteristics. Results indicate successful completion of the first two calls was associated with the increased probability of scheduling or completing follow-up appointment (15.5% points, p