Acute patients discharged without an established diagnosis: risk of mortality and readmission of nonspecific diagnoses compared to disease-specific diagnoses

Background Nonspecific discharge diagnoses after acute hospital courses represent patients discharged without an established cause of their complaints. These patients should have a low risk of adverse outcomes as serious conditions should have been ruled out. We aimed to investigate the mortality and readmissions following nonspecific discharge diagnoses compared to disease-specific diagnoses and assessed different nonspecific subgroups. Methods Register-based cohort study including hospital courses beginning in emergency departments across 3 regions of Denmark during March 2019–February 2020. We identified nonspecific diagnoses from the R- and Z03-chapter in the ICD-10 classification and excluded injuries, among others—remaining diagnoses were considered disease-specific. Outcomes were 30-day mortality and readmission, the groups were compared by Cox regression hazard ratios (HR), unadjusted and adjusted for socioeconomics, comorbidity, administrative information and laboratory results. We stratified into short (3–<12 h) or lengthier (12–168 h) hospital courses. Results We included 192,185 hospital courses where nonspecific discharge diagnoses accounted for 50.7% of short and 25.9% of lengthier discharges. The cumulative risk of mortality for nonspecific vs. disease-specific discharge diagnoses was 0.6% (0.6–0.7%) vs. 0.8% (0.7–0.9%) after short and 1.6% (1.5–1.7%) vs. 2.6% (2.5–2.7%) after lengthier courses with adjusted HRs of 0.97 (0.83–1.13) and 0.94 (0.85–1.05), respectively. The cumulative risk of readmission for nonspecific vs. disease-specific discharge diagnoses was 7.3% (7.1–7.5%) vs. 8.4% (8.2–8.6%) after short and 11.1% (10.8–11.5%) vs. 13.7% (13.4–13.9%) after lengthier courses with adjusted HRs of 0.94 (0.90–0.98) and 0.95 (0.91–0.99), respectively. We identified 50 clinical subgroups of nonspecific diagnoses, of which Abdominal pain ( n  = 12,462; 17.1%) and Chest pain ( n  = 9,599; 13.1%) were the most frequent. The subgroups described differences in characteristics with mean age 41.9 to 80.8 years and mean length of stay 7.1 to 59.5 h, and outcomes with < 0.2–8.1% risk of 30-day mortality and 3.5–22.6% risk of 30-day readmission. Conclusions In unadjusted analyses, nonspecific diagnoses had a lower risk of mortality and readmission than disease-specific diagnoses but had a similar risk after adjustments. We identified 509 clinical subgroups of nonspecific diagnoses with vastly different characteristics and prognosis. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13049-024-01191-4.