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Avoidable emergency department (ED) visits are down among pediatric gastroenterology patients thanks to a quality improvement initiative launched in 2013. Researchers say they are hopeful that these results can translate to other pediatric specialties as well as adult medicine.
Because of the high cost associated with ED visits, the study’s researchers stress the importance of getting specialists involved in initiatives that help reduce unnecessary ED utilization.
Dr. Jarone Lee, an ER doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital and his research team explained how the initiative worked in a paper released online last week.
"As part of this project, pediatric gastroenterologists began receiving reports with rates of ED utilization by their patients,” Lee wrote. “The reports generated discussion and a cultural shift and process change in which patients with urgent complaints were treated preferentially in the outpatient office instead of the ED."
As a result of the intervention, GI-related ED visits dropped 60 percent from 4.89 to 1.95 per 1,000 office visits. That decrease accounted for about 20 fewer visits to the ED each month.
In an email to Reuters Health, Dr. Lee said, "I believe that our intervention can be used at any hospital system that has the dedicated resources and databases to support it."
He noted, "Our project was a simple, low-cost, intervention that allowed us physicians to provide improved and more efficient care to our patients. In terms of implementation, it does take time. The reports were straightforward to build, but to gain buy-in from the physicians, that took focused time and effort. As a result, for a project like this to work, I believe that the project would need dedicated resources."
Lee and his team are looking to expand the initiative to five other pediatric divisions and six divisions in adult medicine. They also have plans to work with surgical specialties in the near future with the hope of having a similar decrease in avoidable ED visits.
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