One in 20 infants is admitted to the hospital during the first year of life. As frightening as it may be for families to have a child whose health condition requires hospitalization, in too many cases the experience gets worse when a relapse or problem managing the condition after discharge means their child must be re-admitted later. Babies born prematurely are among the groups of children are at highest risk of hospital readmission.

With a new grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), researchers at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are working to reduce the need for pediatric readmissions by taking a population-level look at clinical factors, and an up-close look at familial and social factors, that send high-risk groups of children back to the hospital.

“The long-term goal is to take this information and develop real-time predictions,” said study leader Scott Lorch, MD, MSCE, director of the Center for Perinatal and Pediatric Health Disparities Research at CHOP and associate professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “We are looking for things that can be fed back to the clinical team to say, based on these factors, this patient has a higher than usual risk of readmission.”