Diagnosis of Nonemergency Visits

With medical costs rising, recent attempts to reduce emergency department use have occurred in some states and Medicaid programs. One approach is to deny or limit payment for an emergency department visit if the discharge diagnosis is classified as a “nonemergency” condition. A new study examined how often patients who are treated in the emergency department with the same initial symptoms have a “nonemergency” or an actual life-threatening diagnosis after being evaluated.  “It could be a life-threatening diagnosis or it could be something that ends up not being an emergency.”  Dr. Maria Raven and co-authors evaluated a nationally representative sample of nearly 35,000 emergency department visits. “Of the patients that had the same presenting complaints as the patients that had these nonemergency diagnoses at the end a substantial portion needed to be admitted to the hospital.” The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.