Repeated Critical Illness and Unplanned Readmissions Within 1 Year to PICUs*

Objectives: To determine the occurrence rate of unplanned readmissions to PICUs within 1 year and examine risk factors associated with repeated readmission. Design: Retrospective cohort analysis. Setting: Seventy-six North American PICUs that participated in the Virtual Pediatric Systems, LLC (VPS, LLC, Los Angeles, CA). Patients: Ninety-three thousand three hundred seventy-nine PICU patients discharged between 2009 and 2010. Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: Index admissions and unplanned readmissions were characterized and their outcomes compared. Time-to-event analyses were performed to examine factors associated with readmission within 1 year. Eleven percent (10,233) of patients had 15,625 unplanned readmissions within 1 year to the same PICU; 3.4% had two or more readmissions. Readmissions had significantly higher PICU mortality and longer PICU length of stay, compared with index admissions (4.0% vs 2.5% and 2.5 vs 1.6 d; all p

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