This is a study which blows up the notion of the uninsured taxing emergency rooms.

“Frequent fliers” is the term used by ER people to describe patients who come in more often than most. In this study, most “frequent fliers” are insured 85% of the time. Most commonly, this patient group is insured by Medicaid or Medicare. They have primary care doctors also.

The uninsured are no more likely to be frequent visitors of Emergency Departments than they are occasional users.

As you might expect, “frequent ED users also tended to be sicker than occasional users, according to the researchers, with one study estimating the admission rate for frequent users at 51% per year during a 5-year period.

“These patients also were more likely to be transported by ambulance and had greater mortality associated with their ED visits.”

Interestingly, patients who have more than five outpatient visits a year are—independent of all other factors—-are more likely to have more ED visits.

Medpage Today

“Most patients who visit the emergency department (ED) four or more times a year have health insurance and a primary care physician, a review of the literature found.

“”The uninsured represent only 15% of frequent users and are no more likely to be frequent users than they are to be occasional ED users (<4 visits/year),” Eduardo LaCalle, MD, MPH and Elaine Rabin, MD, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, wrote online in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

“Their review also showed that frequent ED users were more likely than occasional users to have visited primary care physicians in the previous year.

“In fact, having five or more outpatient visits within the year was an independent risk factor for frequent ED use. “These findings underscore the important observation that most frequent users indeed have primary care physicians,” the researchers wrote.”

Source: Medpage Today, April 10, 2010

Citation: Primary source: Annals of Emergency Medicine, Ann Emerg Med 2010; DOI:10.1016/j.annemergmed.2010.01.032