Avoidable emergency department visits: a starting point.

Sources of Potentially Avoidable Emergency Department Visits.

Travel distance and sociodemographic correlates of potentially avoidable emergency department visits in California, 2006–2010: an observational study

INTRODUCTION Use of the hospital emergency department (ED) for medical conditions not likely to require immediate treatment is a controversial topic. It has been faulted for ED overcrowding, increased expenditures, and decreased quality of care. On the other hand, such avoidable ED utilization may be a manifestation of barriers to primary care access. METHODS A random 10% subsample of all ED ...

Emergency Department Use by Community-Dwelling Individuals With Dementia in the United States: An Integrative Review.

As part of the National Plan to Address Alzheimer's Disease, reducing potentially avoidable emergency department (ED) use by individuals with dementia has been identified as a component of enhancing the quality and efficiency of care for this population. To help inform the development of interventions to achieve this goal, an integrative review was conducted to: (a) compare rates and reasons fo...

Avoidable and unavoidable visits to the emergency department among patients with advanced cancer receiving outpatient palliative care.

CONTEXT Admissions to the emergency department (ED) can be distressing to patients with advanced cancer receiving palliative care. There is limited research about the clinical characteristics of these patients and whether these ED visits can be categorized as avoidable or unavoidable. OBJECTIVES To determine the frequency of potentially avoidable ED visits (AvEDs) for patients with advanced c...

Classification of emergency department visits: how many are necessary?

In a recent year, hospital emergency departments (EDs) in Rhode Island provided care to over 380,000 patients who did not require subsequent admission to an inpatient or observation bed.1 Many ED visits are for true emergencies that could not be treated in other health care settings, but there has been much discussion among providers, payers, and policy makers on whether some of these patients ...