BMNO partner Health & Medicine Policy Research Group, a Chicago-based policy center that challenges inequities in health care, recently released its white paper, “Addressing Inequities in Care Transitions.” Their paper compiles findings on disparities in 30-day readmission rates along racial and socioeconomic lines. They organize findings by an individual’s characteristics (such as race/ethnicity and coverage type), hospital characteristics, and community characteristics. The authors also investigated how this is playing out in Chicago, comparing Medicare readmission penalties at minority-serving hospitals and hospitals that have a majority of patients who are non-Hispanic and white.

The authors also aimed to compile best practices among transitional care interventions for addressing those disparities and hoped to make recommendations for modifications to the Bridge Model, but they ended up finding very little evidence about transitional care interventions that have aimed to address disparities specifically. Instead, the authors opted to compile best practices for reducing outcome disparities across settings, such as building community partnerships, practicing cultural humility, and engaging non-medical partners. They then discuss how some of those practices could be applied to transitional care, and the Bridge Model specifically.

A blogpost summarizing the paper can be found here, and the paper itself can be read here. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for future research, please contact co-author Bonnie Ewald at [email protected].