Rationale: Complexity is increasingly recognized as a critical variable in health care. However, there is still lack of practical tools to assess it and tackle the challenges that stem from it, particularly within hospitals.
Aims and objective:To validate a simple novel screening method based on both objective and subjective criteria to identify patients with clinically complex hospitalization events. To evaluate the prevalence of patients with complex events, identify their features, and compare them with those of the other patients and to those of patients with multimorbidities.
Method:We monitored the level of complexity of the hospitalization events of 240 patients admitted to an internal medicine ward in Tuscany over the course of 56 days. We compared the demographic features, the length of stay, and the prognosis of patients with and without complex events.
Results:Sixty-nine patients (28.8% of the sample) had a complex episode during their stay, and 115 (47.9%) had phases of low complexity. Patients with complex episodes were younger and more comorbid than patients without. They stayed longer in-hospital (+4.5 days; 95% CI: 2.5-6.5) and had higher mortality (OR: 24.93;) and a lower probability of home discharge (OR: 0.25; 95% CI: 0.13-0.48).
Conclusions:The results show that using a simple screening method is possible to identify complex patients within IM wards and that every day, about one-third of the patients are complex. The results are discussed in implications for the dynamic management of patients with complex and simple phases during hospitalization.
KEYWORDSclinical complexity, internal medicine, measurement tools, multimorbidityThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. for a simple problem (eg, pneumonia) with a predictable and definite path/outcome. Therefore, using multimorbidity to identify complex patients also suffers from low specificity, which would seem particularly undesirable given the extremely high, and exponentially growing, prevalence of this condition today.
11Complexity is a property of systems with a high number of components, interacting dynamically and nonlinearly at multiple levels, also through feedback loops, so that the evolution of the system is not predictable. In a patient, therefore, complexity can be seen as the 15 Conducting an assessment with this method, however, requires a specific training and takes an amount of time that, though limited (15-20 min), could make it difficult to use in practice in a strongly time-constrained setting such as an internal medicine ward.In the light of these problems with defining and measuring complexity, and to develop solutions for managing it, it might be useful to expand the focus from the complexity of the patients to the one of the tasks carried out by professionals in providing health care for patients. Clin...