Children's Hospital Association: Reading the Signals for Readmission Risk

The High Acuity Readmission Risk Pediatric Screen (HARRPS) Tool© is well-established in reducing children’s hospital inpatient readmissions. For its creators, getting to that point has been an unexpected journey.

“Like many quality improvement initiatives, we initially thought we’d have it up and running in a few weeks,” said Blair Buenning, MSN, RN, CPN, ACM-RN, quality improvement consultant at Children's Mercy Kansas City. “We realized very quickly it was going to be a long process.”

It began in 2017 around Children’s Mercy’s nursing care management initiatives. While screening patients to determine their case management needs, Buenning and her team discovered there was no tool readily available to assess pediatric readmission risks. The need was clear: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Pediatric Quality Measures Program consider readmissions as a quality indicator for hospitals. Additionally, preventable pediatric readmissions in the U.S. cost $1.5 billion annually.

Read the full article via the Children's Hospital Association.