Observational Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Aug 27, 2019; 11(8): 646-655
Published online Aug 27, 2019. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v11.i8.646
Outpatient telephonic transitional care after hospital discharge improves survival in cirrhotic patients
Bhavana Bhagya Rao, Anastasia Sobotka, Rocio Lopez, Carlos Romero-Marrero, William Carey
Bhavana Bhagya Rao, Anastasia Sobotka, Rocio Lopez, Carlos Romero-Marrero, William Carey, Department of Gastroenterology Hepatology and Nutrition, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH 44195, United States
Author contributions: Rao BB contributed to study concept and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, statistical analysis, and drafting of the manuscript; Sobotka A contributed to implementation of intervention, acquisition of data, and critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content; Lopez R contributed to statistical analysis; Romero-Marrero C contributed to critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content and study supervision; Carey W contributed to study concept and design, critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content, and study supervision.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation Institutional Review Board.
Informed consent statement: After review of the study characteristics, a waiver of informed consent was approved by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation Institutional Review Board.
Conflict-of-interest statement: No potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article were reported.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: William Carey, MD, Doctor, Department of Gastroenterology Hepatology and Nutrition, Cleveland Clinic, 9500 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44195, United States. careyw@ccf.org
Telephone: +1-216-4446521 Fax: +1-216-4455477
Received: January 29, 2019
Peer-review started: January 29, 2019
First decision: March 3, 2019
Revised: June 12, 2019
Accepted: July 4, 2019
Article in press: July 5, 2019
Published online: August 27, 2019
Core Tip

Core tip: We share results of a novel intervention that provides transitional care via telephone to cirrhotic patients after hospital discharge. Over a 6 mo follow-up, the intervention group experienced 60% lower odds for mortality compared to controls with similar readmission rates. Our manuscript not only describes an effective transitional care program to improve post-discharge outcomes in cirrhotic patients but also highlights the need to acknowledge the dissociation between readmissions and survival in this population.