By Gina Shaw, Emergency Medicine News, September 1, 2019
Frequent emergency department users are sometimes dismissed as frequent fliers, stigmatized as patients with low-acuity medical complaints or manageable chronic conditions who are taking up limited ED bed space and contributing to long waits.
New research, however, found that these patients are at serious risk. Frequent visits to the ED are predictive of mortality among nonelderly patients in the short (seven days) and long terms (two years). (Health Aff [Millwood]. 2019;38[1]:155.) Increased mortality risk remained even after controlling for comorbidities, demographic characteristics, and insurance status. It is the first study to account for deaths in and out of the hospital, and it links multiple years of state health services utilization and death data.
Researchers from the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) and Mathematica in Oakland, CA, used the 2005-2013 nonpublic data about all ED visits at nonfederal, licensed hospitals from California's Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. They wrote, “This allowed us to accurately and comprehensively capture ED use even among patients who changed insurance coverage and those who visited multiple EDs.”
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