Hospital Exit Strategy: What Happens After Discharge?

Nobody wants to be hospitalized or plans for it to happen. Especially with the pandemic, we have seen incredibly high numbers of hospitalizations. In many cases, you get discharged and leave the hospital. But what happens afterward? Does life just go on as usual? Well, it depends! 

Joining us today to tackle some of these difficult questions is Dr. Vignesh Doraiswamy, an Internal Medicine and Pediatric hospitalist at Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. He talks about the importance of post-acute care/rehab and inpatient therapy evaluations. He dives into how patients want to go home as soon as they're ready for discharge, but this can inevitably prolong their recovery. He also discusses the lived experiences of physicians in hospitals who handle care. Finally he touches on the inequities in receiving the vaccine, the booster shot, and projections for the future. 

*Please note that this episode was recorded before the rise in cases of Omicron, so while certain numbers may be different at the moment, the general concepts are largely the same.  

Dr. Doraiswamy is an assistant professor at The Ohio State College of Medicine where he works with medical students as a Portfolio Coach and Applied Health Systems Science Coach. At The OSU James Cancer Center, he is the Quality and Patient Safety Lead for the James Hospitalist service lines and he is an Associate Medical director at OSU’s University Hospital. He completed a combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residency and was the Med-Peds chief resident at Penn State Health. Dr. Doraiswamy is actively involved in medical student and resident education with interests in health equity and advocacy, health systems science, curriculum design and clinical reasoning. 

Connect with him:

IG: @vigneshd

Twitter: @DoctorVig