The nature of Emergency Room services makes the patients' visits hard to predict and control and the services incur high costs. Chronic patients should not require urgent care to treat their chronic illness, if they were properly managed in primary care. We track frequency of emergency room visits by chronically ill when the primary complaint of record is their chronic condition. We use a record of institutional insurance claims collected in over 400 hospitals in California between 2006 and 2010. We identify dimensions of data that provide statistically significant differences of utilization between strata. We found particularly significant differences in resource utilization subject to type of insurance coverage carried by the patient, and subject to patient's age. We studied Diabetes, Asthma, and Arthritis patients from 8 age groups spanning ages 5 to 85, and 13 insurance payer types.
Objective
To study patterns of utilization of emergency care resources by chronically ill in order to identify efficiency and quality of care improvement opportunities.