Where did all the emergencies go?

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When COVID-19 hit, hospitals knew they would see a decline in elective surgeries and routine visits. After all, they canceled them! But the volume of patients visiting the emergency room has also dropped dramatically, and no one can seem to fully explain it. Sure, maybe we could expect fewer car crashes and skiing injuries. But heart attacks and strokes? If anything it seems like those numbers should be going up due to higher stress levels. Yet, the analyses in cardiac care during the pandemic show a sharp decline not only in elective cardiac procedures, but also in cardiac catheterizations for acute heart attacks, specifically, those with ST segment elevations – the most life threatening type.  

Conventional wisdom tells us that the drop in ER visits is a bad thing. Patients must be dying at home, outcomes must be worsening, and the patients that do survive will show up as train wrecks once the pandemic subsides. Those assumptions are probably true to a certain extent, but the open question is how true?   Acute conditions and complications warrant acute care.  But in the routine care of behavioral health and other chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, extensive overuse of the emergency room rather than other ambulatory settings has been a prime area of concern and debate for several years.  

We know that ERs are overused in normal times. And we think they’re underused now during the pandemic, but to what extent should be analyzed and debated as we inform the necessary adaptation of our systems of care.  We expect to see an incredible amount of variation in ER utilization as the situation unfolds, by specific patient populations, urban vs rural settings, and geography-specific COVID-19 case burden. 

We are encouraged that Datavant has convened a wide variety of industry players to construct a COVID-19 Research Database, a set of de-identified data sets made freely available to enable rapid studies at scale.  The new initiative fills an important gap between quick observations that are available from small sets of real world data and clinical trials, which are robust but slow.

The ER phenomenon we’re discussing is not completely unprecedented. Researchers (and ER staff) have long observed the ‘big game effect’ – where ER visits decline as people defer them to watch their favorite team. (The Health Business Blog first reported on it in 2005: Red Sox’ success eases health care crisis.) Some, but not all, of those visits are avoided entirely without negative consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity for a much longer time series. Let’s use it as a chance to study what’s going on so we can apply the lessons learned as we emerge.

What could explain sustained, lower utilization of the ER? There are a few possibilities:

1. Many seemingly serious problems resolve on their own when people just wait. If people avoid the ER out of fear, the ‘tincture of time’ will often do the job.
2. Less aggressive ambulatory settings are proving effective: the physician’s office, a telehealth visit, or home remedies.
3. The momentum and logic of the ER setting makes matters seem more serious than they really are. Once someone appears there’s always something to find. (As a doctor colleague once told me, “Show me someone who’s perfectly healthy and I’ll give him a full workup to demonstrate otherwise.”)
4. The ER is the entry point for admission to the hospital. Under fee for service, hospitals need to admit patients to make money. Depending on the proportion of available beds during these uncertain times, hospitals may be even more economically motivated than usual to fill open beds. So, once a patient arrives, they may be staying.
5. A significant portion of ER traffic is composed of so-called ‘frequent fliers.’ Usually, they are tolerated, but in the current environment, ER staff are motivated to triage non-COVID-19 patients away from the hospital as efficiently as possible. Once this becomes evident, the ‘frequent fliers’ ground themselves.
6. How many times have you called your doctor’s office or pharmacy and heard the recording say, “If this is a medical emergency, hang up and dial 9-1-1”? That definitely got people used to the idea that the ER is a good place for care. Clearly people are ignoring that messaging now!

So what should we do with this unexpected information?

1. More finely tune financial incentives to discourage unneeded utilization while not discouraging needed care. We know from experience that bluntly requiring large patient financial contributions drive down both good and bad utilization.
2. Educate people about the downside of ER visits (infection risk, treatment that’s too aggressive, likelihood of admission to hospital, provider that doesn’t know you) to balance out the current bias for ER care. People will be more receptive now and won’t immediately think that health plans are only trying to ration their care. 
3. Consider other changes in benefit design to help the decreased utilization persist, including increased access and reimbursement for home services, telehealth, and remote management tools.
4. Encourage physician offices and others to make better efforts to intervene quickly and prevent people from going to the ER just for convenience. This could include on-demand availability of telehealth consultations and other digital/remote management for which they would be reimbursed.

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By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group and Surya Singh MD, president of Singh Healthcare Advisors.

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* This article was originally published here