T240. DOES SCHEDULING A POST-DISCHARGE OUTPATIENT MENTAL HEALTH APPOINTMENT INCREASE THE LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION FROM HOSPITAL TO COMMUNITY-BASED CARE?

BACKGROUND: Scheduling timely appointments for outpatient follow-up care is a discharge planning practice widely accepted as a standard of care for inpatient treatment. Despite these endorsements, however, rates of hospital providers completing these practices vary widely. Timely scheduling of initial outpatient visits following discharge has been associated with improved rates of attending outpatient psychiatric services, although negative findings have also been reported. Nearly all prior studies were single-site case reports that did not use an experimental design and more rigorous research is needed. In this report, we aimed to examine the association between receiving care transition practices and attending outpatient care after controlling for patient, hospital, and system characteristics in a large cohort of inpatient psychiatric admissions in New York State. We hypothesized that patients for whom hospital providers scheduled a mental health outpatient appointment had a higher likelihood of receiving an initial outpatient psychiatric service following discharge after controlling for the aforementioned covariates. METHODS: This is a retrospective cohort study that used 2012–2013 New York State Medicaid claims data for psychiatric inpatients, who were under 65 years, admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit with a principal diagnosis of a mental disorder and discharged to the community. The outcome variable was defined as attending to outpatient psychiatric services within 7 and 30 days following discharge from an inpatient psychiatric unit. Scheduling a mental health outpatient appointment as a discharge planning was the primary independent variable. To address the wide range of potentially confounding covariates, propensity scores for regression models were estimated based on patient, hospital, and service system factors. RESULTS: Before matching by propensity scores, those who had an outpatient mental health appointment scheduled were less likely to be homeless at admission, have a co-occurring substance use diagnosis, and live in large central metro areas, and were more likely to be previously engaged in psychiatric outpatient services. After matching, however, most systematic differences between those who had and those who did not have a mental health outpatient appointment scheduled were substantially diminished (standardized differences of <20%). In the adjusted models including propensity scores, patients who had a mental health outpatient appointment scheduled were more likely to be in treatment in aftercare services compared to patients who did not have an outpatient appointment at both 7 and 30 days following discharge. DISCUSSION: Scheduling an outpatient mental health appointment increases aftercare attendance following a psychiatric discharge. This effect was noted across all 5 propensity strata, indicating that discharge planning has a positive impact regardless of the presence of other factors highly predictive of failure to attend aftercare appointments.