Dennis Tsilimingras, former director of the Center on Patient Safety at the College of Medicine, recently published results of a study he undertook at Florida State with the help of a $900,000 grant from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Working with the Tallahassee Memorial Hospitalist Group, Tsilimingras monitored approximately 600 patients - about half of them from rural areas - for three weeks after they were discharged from the hospital. The goal was to evaluate how safe the health-care system is for patients transitioning from hospital to home, and to see if being from a rural area had any effect on those outcomes.
"Post-Discharge adverse events among urban and rural patients of an urban community hospital: a prospective cohort study," was published by the Journal of General Internal Medicine online. College of Medicine faculty who served as co-authors include John Agens (Department of Geriatrics), Stephen Quintero (Family Medicine and Rural Health) and Gail Bellamy (director of the Center for Rural Health Research and Policy).
"This was the first comprehensive study of post-discharge adverse events that included rural patients," Tsilimingras said. "Surprisingly, there were no differences in the incidence of post-discharge adverse events between urban and rural patients, but adverse events in urban patients were associated with hypertension, Type 2 diabetes mellitus, and secondary discharge diagnoses."
Link to the published article [pdf}
