Improving care transitions with standardized peer mentoring: Evidence from intervention based research using randomized control trial

Abstract

We investigate how patients can co-create value when transitioning care between the hospital and home after a major life altering surgery such as kidney transplant. Collaborating with health care providers at a large U.S. hospital, we adopted an intervention-based research approach to develop a standardized peer-mentoring program where former patients mentor current patients for 30 days postdischarge. We assessed the impact of the program on patient anxiety and 30-day readmissions through a randomized control trial that recruited 80 transplant patients. Our analyses of patient anxiety indicated that patients in the treatment arm experienced 3.42 points greater decrease in anxiety score over 30 days, suggesting that care transitions using mentors decreases anxiety levels among patients. Our analyses of readmissions led to an unexpected but explainable result. We found that patients in the treatment arm were at 12.6 times greater risk of readmission during the first 30 days.Exploratory analysis suggests that increased readmission may have been due to patients reporting complications sooner, which allowed them to get treated earlier. Overall, our study informs healthcare operations on how to design effective transition of care programs using cost-effective resources and offers new insights on using patient-centric metrics.