The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between hospital professionals' ratings of their interdisciplinary discharge planning collaboration (IDPC) and the occurrence of post-discharge outcomes later experienced by a sample of elderly hospital patients. The specific objective is to investigate the relationship between 44 professionals' ratings of their recent level of IDPC and other patient characteristics, and six post- discharge clinical and utilization outcomes experienced by a sample of 225 elderly patients. The poorly coordinated discharges of chronically ill or elderly patients have been demonstrated to result in lower functional abilities, more frequent emergency room visits, increased hospital readmissions, lower patient satisfaction levels, and more unscheduled patient-provider contacts. The beneficial patient outcomes, that have been correlated with higher ratings of discharge planning collaboration, suggest that the health care system has an inherent policy interest to develop a fuller understanding of the patient outcomes associated with IDPC. This will be the first project that includes professionals' ratings of their recent discharge planning collaboration during the analysis of post- discharge patient outcome data. The validation of these hypothesized relationships between such collaboration and elderly patient outcomes will help to justify the implementation of programs designed to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration during hospital discharge planning.
