Introduction: The Hospital to Home Outcomes study began with the end goal of evaluating the effectiveness of a single, nurse-led transitional home visit (home visit) program, for acutely ill, pediatric patients, which had been piloted at our institution. As part of the overall study design, building on prior randomized control trials that utilized a run-in period prior to the trial, our study team designed an optimization period to test the home visit and study procedures under real-world conditions.
Methods: For this optimization project, there were 3 process improvement goals: to improve the referral process to the home visit, to optimize the home visit content, and to define and operationalize measures of patient- and family-centered outcomes to be used in the subsequent randomized control trial.