Surgical Readmissions: A Method to the Madness

In this issue, Morris and colleagues¹ describe the effect of the timing of surgical complications on hospital readmission and clearly demonstrate that most postdischarge complications require inpatient care. This is timely because we are all struggling to better understand how to reduce surgical readmissions. Clearly, efforts to prevent surgical readmissions must be focused on a variety of interventions along the continuum of care, starting as early as when the patient is considering surgery as well as including widely popularized postdischarge care coordination interventions.²