Patients with cancer who are discharged to hospice care are less likely to be readmitted to the hospital; however, there remains a proportion of patients who rescind hospice care after enrolling, according to a recent study. In order to examine this subgroup of patients and determine their readmission rate, researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study using administrative data of adult patients discharged from a non-surgical solid tumor service at University of Texas-The MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who were discharged to hospice care. Readmission was defined as any re-hospitalization after discharge regardless of timing. They found:

• There were 1,452 discharge encounters with a disposition of hospice in the cohort with 50 resulting in readmission (readmission rate=3.4%).
• Majority of the readmitted patients were female (60%), had a religious affiliation (83%), and were English-speaking (85%); mean age was 59 years.
• 75% of the patients had metastatic disease at time of first presentation at MD Anderson.