Does transitional care management improve outcomes after discharge from the hospital?

I've spent the past week as the attending physician on my residency program's adult inpatient service. Since the turn of the century, the rise of hospitalists and the corresponding decline in the number of office-based family physicians who provide inpatient care for their own patients has magnified the value of optimizing the handoff from hospital-based teams to primary care physicians. Chronic conditions that frequently lead to readmissions, such as heart failure, have been targets of transitional care interventions that may include self-care education, home visits, telephone contacts, and office visits. A 2014 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality review found consistent evidence that high-intensity, multicomponent interventions for patients with heart failure reduced readmissions and mortality for 3 to 6 months after hospital discharge.

Recognizing their potential to save money and improve outcomes, in 2013 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began allowing practices to bill separately for transitional care management (TCM) services that included an interactive contact within two business days of discharge and a dedicated face-to-face office visit within 14 days. Practices developed novel workflows to support TCM and to ensure that it is financially sustainable, as reviewed in a 2023 article in FPM. Although use of TCM has gradually increased, some have expressed concern that these billing codes were not supporting primary care as expected, with one-fifth of Medicare TCM claims being billed by a practice that was not the patient’s primary care practice. A recent study found that TCM was less likely to be delivered to Medicare patients at the highest risk of readmission:

Racial and ethnic minority status, dual [Medicare and Medicaid] eligibility, dementia, and frailty were common among patients at high risk for readmission as well as those who were less likely to receive TCM service. These findings suggest that poor socioeconomic status and impaired functional status may act as factors for readmission as well as barriers to TCM access.

More than a decade into the program, it remains uncertain whether TCM actually improves outcomes. An analysis of Medicare data from 2012 to 2017 found that "using TCM codes was linked to a modest reduction in the number of patients readmitted to the hospital within 30 and 90 days after discharge, with the greatest improvements seen in 2017. However, we did not observe a significant association with patient deaths after discharge overall."

Also, a systematic review and meta-analysis of 13 studies (including 11 randomized trials) published since 2012 found that post-discharge contacts (mostly telephone calls) within 7 days of discharge had no effects on 30-day emergency department use or hospital readmissions compared with usual care.

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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.