Frequency of New or Worsening Symptoms in the Posthospitalization Period

The authors thank Rahul M. Dodhia for his assis-tance in the statistical analysis of the data and Sunil Kripalani for his thoughtful review of the manuscript. Data collection, analysis, and authors ’ salaries were all paid for by IPC—The Hospitalist Com-pany. This abstract was initially presented at the Society of Hospital Medicine annual meeting in April 2004 and was published as part of the proceedings of that meeting. The abstract results also have been reported in several hospitalist-related publications. BACKGROUND: When patients are discharged from the hospital, they are assumed to be stable until follow-up as outpatients. OBJECTIVE: To study the frequency of new or worsening symptoms within 2-5 day