Identifying Hospital Patients Who Need Early Discharge Planning for Special Dispositions: A Comparison of Alternative Techniques

Identifying patients early in their hospitalizations who need discharge planning to arrange special care dispositions is a difficult task. Failure to achieve early identification may result in unnecessarily prolonged hospital stays and a less orderly process of planning. In this study three brief rating instruments for identifying such patients were compared and found to have different performance characteristics when applied to a large population of patients admitted to a short–term, general medical and surgical hospital. Operational objectives for a discharge–planning screening program are specified and used as grounds for choosing among alternative screening instruments.