MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Ernest Moy, MD, MPH
Medical Officer
Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Medical Research: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Moy: The amount of time that a patient spends in the emergency department (ED) has become increasingly viewed as a quality measure, because length of stay and ED crowding have been linked to quality of care, patient safety, and treatment outcomes. However, current ED length-of-stay measures publicly reported by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) combine lengths of stay across all conditions. We suspected that ED length of stay is influenced by the clinical condition of the patient, but didn’t know how disparate times might be. Of course, such stays will certainly be influenced by other factors, which we describe in the paper. Previous studies have helped guide decisions about where to focus resources to improve emergency department services. However, many studies about ED length of stay focus on a single condition, a single or few hospitals, or both, which limits what we can conclude across different conditions. We were fortunate to find one state, Florida, in the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project database that provides entry and exit times for a census of
emergency department visits for both released and admitted patients to measure length of ED stays by patients’ conditions and dispositions.
Medical Research: What are the main findings?
Dr. Moy: For the 10 most common diagnoses, patients with relatively minor injuries (e.g., sprains and strains, superficial injuries and contusions, skin and subcutaneous tissue infections, open wounds of the extremities) typically required the shortest mean stays (3 hours or less). Conditions involving pain with nonspecific or unclear etiologies (e.g., chest, abdomen, or back pain; headache, including migraine), generally resulted in mean stays of 4 hours or more. However, there were substantial clinical differences among patients released, admitted, and transferred. Conditions resulting in admission or transfer tended to be more serious, resulting in longer stays. Patients requiring the longest stays, by disposition, had discharge diagnoses of nonspecific chest pain (mean 7.4 hours among discharged patients), urinary tract infections (4.8 hours among admissions), and schizophrenia (9.6 hours among transfers) among the top 10 diagnoses.
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