There and back again: analyzing the effect of outpatient readmission on the quality of life of patients attending a rheumatology clinic

AIMS: The aim of this study was to assess the effect of “outpatient readmissions” on the health-related quality of life (HR-QoL) of outpatients from a rheumatology clinic, meaning the effect of the patient’s return to the outpatient clinic after having received care and been discharged. METHODS: We conducted an observational longitudinal retrospective study, with patients selected from the Hospital Clínico San Carlos Musculoskeletal cohort, based on having received at least one discharge from the outpatient clinic and having returned (readmission) at least once after the discharge. The main outcomes were the patients’ baseline HR-QoL (measured on the first visit of each episode) and the ΔHR-QoL (difference between the HR-QoL in the last and the first visit of each episode). Successive episodes of admission and readmission were chronologically ordered, paired and analyzed using nested linear mixed models, nested by patients and by admission–readmission tandem. We carried out bivariable and multivariable analyses to assess the effect of demographic, clinical, treatment and comorbidity-related variables in both main outcomes. RESULTS: For the first main outcome, 5887 patients (13,772 episodes) were analyzed. Based on the multivariable level, readmission showed no significant marginal effect on the baseline HR-QoL (p-value = 0.17). Conversely, when analyzing the ΔHR-QoL, we did observe a negative and significant marginal effect (p-value = 0.028), meaning that readmission was associated with a lower gain in the HR-QoL during the follow-up, compared with the previous episode. CONCLUSION: In the outpatient setting, readmission exerts a deleterious effect in patients undergoing this process. Identification of outpatients more likely to be readmitted could increase the value of the care provided.