Background: Follow-up and continuity of care after discharge with community healthcare providers, as well as subsequent acute care use, is not well understood.

Objectives: To create a registry of patients from a tertiary children?s hospital (SickKids) and describe their health services use after discharge.

Methods: We assembled a longitudinal cohort of SickKids patients with asthma (aged 0-19 years) using population-based health administrative databases from 1996-2022 and followed them for 6 months after discharge. Cox Proportional Hazard, Poisson, and logistic regression models estimated hazard ratios (HR), rate ratios (RR), odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) of asthma-related hospital readmission (hospitalization or ED visits), adjusting for covariates.

Results: Of the 14,897 patients included, 2351 (16%) were readmitted in the 6-month post discharge. Of those readmitted, 1559 (66%) had 1 readmission only while 34% were readmitted more than once. Post discharge, compared to asthma patients who did not have follow-up care, those who saw a community healthcare provider were 19% less likely to be readmitted (HR=0.81,95%CI:0.74-0.89) and were significantly associated with a 26% lower rate of readmission (RR=0.74,95%CI:0.65-0.84). Among those readmitted, those who had follow-up community-based care had lower odds of having multiple hospital readmissions (OR=0.66, 95%CI:0.55-0.79), compared to those who didn?t.

Conclusions: Our study quantified rates of child asthma hospital readmission. Follow-up community healthcare has a significant protective effect on the likelihood of readmission compared to those who did not receive any care post discharge.