Prediction of 7-Day Readmission Risk for Pediatric Trauma Patients

Background: Pediatric patients admitted for trauma may have unique risk factors of unplanned readmission and require condition-specific models to maximize accuracy of prediction. We used a multicenter data set on trauma admissions to study risk factors and predict unplanned 7-day readmissions with comparison to the 30-day metric.

Methods: Data from 28 hospitals in the United States consisting of 82,532 patients (95,158 encounters) were retrieved, and 75% of the data were used for building a random intercept, mixed-effects regression model, whereas the remaining were used for evaluating model performance. The variables included were demographics, payer, current and past health care utilization, trauma-related and other diagnoses, medications, and surgical procedures.

Results: Certain conditions such as poisoning and medical/surgical complications during treatment of traumatic injuries are associated with increased odds of unplanned readmission. Conversely, trauma-related conditions, such as trauma to the thorax, knee, lower leg, hip/thigh, elbow/forearm, and shoulder/upper arm, are associated with reduced odds of readmission. Additional predictors include the current and past health care utilization and the number of medications. The corresponding 7-day model achieved an area under the receiver operator characteristic curve of 0.737 (0.716, 0.757) on an independent test set and shared similar risk factors with the 30-day version.

Conclusions: Patients with trauma-related conditions have risk of readmission modified by the type of trauma. As a result, additional quality of care measures may be required for patients with trauma-related conditions that elevate their risk of readmission.