Cleveland Clinic Children's Outcomes

The _Core 4 Elements for Safe Transitions _promote a reliable discharge process, which has led to reduced readmissions in several patient populations at Cleveland Clinic. Ensuring compliance with admission medication reconciliation, discharge medication reconciliation, scheduling a clinically appropriate follow-up appointment before discharge, and completing the discharge summary prior to the patient leaving the hospital are associated with decreased readmission rates for patients cared for by the Pediatric Hospital Medicine physicians.

Each year the department focuses on one of the Core 4 Elements, and we have completed several projects to ensure high reliability to the medication reconciliation and follow-up appointment processes. While improving our compliance to these Core 4 processes of care, we are sustaining our service line readmission rate at ~2-3%, which represents a notable decrease in our readmission rate prior to adopting the Core 4 elements (our 2015 readmission rate was 10%).

We encourage adherence to the Core 4 process for every patient and look forward to expanding our quality improvement work on these elements.