Identification and Characterization of Avoidable Hospital Admissions in Patients With Lung Cancer
Plain-language summary
A multidisciplinary team retrospectively reviewed the records of lung cancer patients hospitalized during treatment in 2018 to distinguish avoidable from unavoidable admissions. Across 319 admissions in 188 patients, 15% were judged avoidable, and errors in medication management caused about a quarter of those; cancer-related symptoms accounted for most hospitalizations overall. Patients with avoidable admissions had markedly shorter median survival (1.6 vs 9.7 months), pointing to opportunities to reduce hospital burden through better symptom control, medication reconciliation, and timely hospice referral.
Read the full paper (DOI: 10.6004/jnccn.2023.7049).
This is a plain-language summary written for discoverability; the authoritative version is the published paper. Part of Travis Osterman's peer-reviewed publications.