Emergency rooms can earn hospitals revenue: study

CAL/AAEM News Service calaaem_news at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 17 01:33:31 PDT 2006


Emergency rooms can earn hospitals revenue: study

Source: Reuters (by Kim Dixon)
Date: July 12, 2006 


CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. hospital emergency rooms, frequently beset by too many patients
and too few beds, can take in more money if they stop diverting arriving ambulances to
other hospitals, a study on Wednesday said.

By putting in more beds and avoiding so-called ambulance diversion, a hospital could
boost emergency-room revenues by 10 percent, according to the study of a 400-bed Oregon
teaching hospital published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

"It's important that hospitals understand that decreasing ambulance diversion can
translate into higher revenues," said John McConnell, who led the two-year study of his
hospital's emergency room at Oregon Health and Sciences University.

Most emergency rooms are understaffed and overwhelmed with patients and unprepared to
cope with a crisis such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack, the nonprofit
Institute of Medicine said in a recent report. It also said diverting ambulances
inevitably leads to unnecessary deaths.

But hospitals have been hesitant to add capacity because many emergency-room patients are
among the ranks of the 46 million people who lack health insurance and may be unable to
pay.

The new study is one of the first attempts to show the potential financial benefits to
hospitals if they change course, the authors said.

U.S. hospital emergency room visits have risen steadily, jumping 26 percent between 1993
and 2003 to 114 million visits, according to the Institute of Medicine, which advises the
government on health matters.

The Oregon study also found patients entering an emergency room by ambulance are less
likely to be uninsured and more likely to be admitted to the hospital, than patients who
walk in.

"That was a surprise to us," McConnell said. "The patients where a hospital makes a lot
of money is the heart-attack (patient) who is then admitted," he said.

The Oregon hospital treats about 43,000 emergency-room patients each year, and midway
through the studied increased bed capacity.

When beds were added and ambulance diversion dropped, the hospital gained about $175,000
in extra revenue per month.

A major limitation is the study didn't quantify the revenue lost from inpatient beds
being used for emergency patients, Robert Williams of the University of Michigan School
of Public Health said in an editorial in the journal.

"In simple economic terms, one patient is a sure thing and the other, a roll of the
dice," Williams said.


Cyrus Shahpar & Brian Potts 
Managing Editors, CAL/AAEM News Service
University of California, Irvine

The CAL/AAEM Archives are available at: http://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/public/calaaem/


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