In the past six years, eight people from Austin and one from Luling racked up 2,678 emergency room visits in Central Texas, costing hospitals, taxpayers and others $3 million, according to a report from a nonprofit made up of hospitals and other providers that care for the uninsured and low-income Central Texans.
One of the nine spent more than a third of last year in the ER: 145 days. That same patient totaled 554 ER visits from 2003 through 2008.
"We looked at frequent users of emergency departments ... and that's the extreme," said Ann Kitchen, executive director of the Integrated Care Collaboration, the group that presented the report last week to the Travis County Healthcare District board. "What we're really trying to do is find out who's using our emergency rooms ... and find solutions."
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The ICC staff, meanwhile, has been gathering data so its members could learn more about the kinds of patients who use the ER.
The report that mentioned the nine high-frequency patients didn't include reasons for all of those ER visits and didn't identify the patients because of privacy laws. But Kitchen, a former state legislator from Austin, gave a sketch: All nine speak English; three are homeless; five are women whose average age is 40, and four are men whose average age is 50. Seven have a mental health diagnosis and eight have a drug abuse diagnosis. Kitchen said she did not know their citizenship status.
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In a report last year, Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services said that 10 patients made up more than 1 percent of the system's 130,000 contacts with patients in two years. The patients' most common ailments were stomach or chest pains, injuries or respiratory problems.
In the comments section of this blog, a reader adds, "This means that, on average, each of the nine people visited the ER about once a week." Wow.
Ask any juror in any city what their number one complaint about emergency rooms is, and you'll hear "long waits." And it goes without saying that these negative experiences reinforce predispositions about the quality of health care in the local area.
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2 comments:
fyi: This means that, on average, each of the nine people visited the ER about once a week.
this is a consequence of the law called EMTALA which mandates free care for any human that presents as a patient to any ER in the country. austin's ER is the rule, not the exception. this is a dirty little secret that no one will talk about but should you desire to read more about it from an Emergency Physician's perspective you can simply visit my blog and search "EMTALA".
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