Functional status predicts acute care readmission in the traumatic spinal cord injury population

Acute care readmission is an important marker of healthcare quality, especially for traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) patients who are vulnerable to preventable conditions early after injury. The study aimed to determine if functional status is a better predictor of readmission in SCI patients compared to medical comorbidities. The findings suggest that models incorporating functional status outperform those relying on medical comorbidities in predicting readmission risk for this population.

• 1
  The Functional Model (demographics and functional status) outperformed Demographic-Comorbidity models at 3 days and two of three at 30 days.
• 2
  The Functional-Plus models (adding comorbidities to the Functional Model) exhibited negligible improvements in model performance compared to the Functional models.
• 3
  Functional status on admission to inpatient rehabilitation predicts the risk of acute care readmission, with good model calibration, at 3 and 30 days from IRF admission.