Re-admission: $11,231,000 avoided

It’s nice to not have to go to the hospital.  Some patients with long term illnesses feel that there is an even greater measure of our success – how many times has treatment by House Call Doctor Thousand Oaks KEPT them from having to go into the hospital at all.  

Eventually insurance companies and Medicare may track and value this – especially since many of our patient’s prior hospitalizations were $105,000 to $155,000 for EACH hospitalization (and several prior admissions over $1 million).  Generally our patients would be extended ICU, Critical Care, or major orthopedic admissions. 

We definitely know that our patients love skipping the hospital.

Our re-admssion rate from 2011 to 2019 is about 3% for our patients, even though we treat a wider variety of seriously ill patients - and more than 50% of our patients are over age 65 with major medical issues. We continue to see that our focused care and active intervention generates better outcomes for our patients of any age. That's 3.2% if we are being specific as of 2019. There is a reason we are open 24/7 and you can see in the numbers why we believe most patients get better care at home. That thought also includes our patients who live alone. Our staff triages patients well and we are not shy about calling 911 when needed.

The typical hospital in Southern California revolves around a 21% readmission rate.  Some of the best hospitals in the Los Angeles have been able to work doubly hard to cut their readmission rates down to about 16% with one exceptional hospital at 6.3%.  We congratulate them for their stellar work.  However their challenge is systemic:  it’s generally bad for really ill people to be around other sick folks.  Stuff happens. It’s not good.

Meanwhile, compare this to the national 30-day re-admission rates of:

• 24% heart attack
• 19.9% heart failure
• 18.2% pneumonia

We could take the easy way out  -- but we don’t.  We could make ourselves look better if we only count our patients who are readmitted to a hospital for the exact same problem – but we don’t.  We could do this math quarter-by-quarter to “get past” a time when we had some really ill patients under our care – we don’t.

Here is what we do:

House Call Doctor Thousand Oaks counts our entire patient population, and then tracks every single readmission ever, to any hospital, for any reason.  We feel that’s the toughest standard for us to live up to.  That's how we get to our current readmission rate of just a little over 3%.