[Analysis of medical short-term admissions of elderly patients with focus on alternatives to hospitalization].

By a retrospective medical record review it is studied if 334 admissions of acute short-term hospitalization (< 24 hours) of elderly medical patients could have been substituted by alternative solutions. 27% of these admissions were evaluated as substitutable. This study cannot confirm that the number of medical short-term admissions of elderly patients could be reduced by one or more specific interventions, nor that the medical short-term hospitalization generally is inappropriate.