Is that Trip to the Emergency Room REALLY Necessary?

Admit it: there’s a certain sense of comfort in knowing that if you don’t feel good there’s nothing preventing you from rushing over to the nearest hospital emergency room and getting a check-up. The potential problem with that convenience is that if you have a whole lot of people with varying degrees of discomfort and pain clogging up the emergency room, it takes away from time serving those patients with more serious issues and really need to be seen.

Imagine the concern after a recent study regarding upstate New York ER visits revealed that more than 700,000 emergency room trips were being made for minor medical problems such as sore throats and ear-aches.

The Problem

The study – conducted by the Excellus Bluecross Blueshield (BCBS) Healthcare Utilization Management Office – discovered that two-out-of-five ER visits were potentially avoidable. That was only the tip of the iceberg as the report pointed out that one of the most important goals for hospitals should be “…educating the public to use the emergency room only when necessary and appropriate…”

The report cited several other important statistics regarding who really needs to be treated in upstate New York hospital ER’s and when:

– 19% of ER visits were for medical conditions that in fact needed quick treatment – ear infections for example – but these conditions should have been treated in a primary care setting. – One-out-of-four ER visits in which patients were treated and released on the same day was for a medical issue such as a back problem that did not demand medical care within 12 hours. – A significant amount of healthcare dollars could be saved in upstate New York if patients went to see a physician instead of the ER for minor problems. Potential savings range from $8.1 million to $10.7 million and those are conservative figures (according to the excellusbcbs fact sheet) if only 5% of individuals who use a knee-jerk reaction to go to the ER instead go to see a physician. For even more savings up the rate to 25% and the savings jump to between $40.5 and 53.5 million dollars.

The Challenge

The challenge would be convincing someone their symptoms are not life-threatening because obviously if that wasn’t the motivator – especially among the very young and very old – upstate New York ER’s wouldn’t be getting clogged.

The Cure

As a result of these statistics, the Monroe County Medical Society (MCMS) in partnership with FingerLakes Healthcare and Excellus BCBS has launched a radio and television public service campaign in the Rochester NY region that urges individuals to call their physician first when it comes to non-urgent issues.

The Message? If you visit your doctor you’ll probably be seen in a timelier manner while leaving true emergencies to the ER.

At the end of the day, the goal of effective healthcare should be providing patients the highest quality care at the lowest possible cost in the most appropriate environment. In this case the most appropriate environment isn’t the emergency room of your nearest hospital but a timely visit to office of your primary healthcare provider.


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