Preoperative Scale to Determine All-Cause Readmission After Coronary Artery Bypass Operations

Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), the second most common cardiac procedure in the US, was added to the US Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program in 2015. Given the relatively high rate of readmission after CABG, Zywot and colleagues sought to develop a scale for predicting readmission risk. Using the State Inpatient Database discharge records of 126,519 patients from New York and California, the authors found that comorbidities such as renal failure (OR, 1.56) and congestive heart failure (OR, 2.82) were strongly predictive of readmission. Older age, female gender, African American ethnicity, and not having private insurance also predicted a higher readmission rate. Factors that were predictive of and associated with readmission were used to develop a scale of readmission risk, which was shown to be a good predictor of readmission in a validation cohort.