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Insight Into Health Care Services: A Characterization of Emergency Room Visits and Economic Hazards in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2018

Hanadi Hamadi Open the ORCID record for Hanadi Hamadi [Opens in a new window] ,
Emma Apatu ,
Osayande Osagiede  and
Aaron Spaulding
Hanadi Hamadi*
Affiliation:
Department of Public Health, Brooks College of Health, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida
Emma Apatu
Affiliation:
Department of Public Health, Brooks College of Health, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida
Osayande Osagiede
Affiliation:
Department of Health Sciences Research, Mayo Clinic Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Center for the Science of Health Care DeliveryMayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Florida
Aaron Spaulding
Affiliation:
Department of Health Sciences Research, and Division of Health Care Policy and Research, Mayo Clinic Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery, Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Florida
*
Correspondence and reprint requests to Dr Hanadi Hamadi, Department of Public Health, Brooks College of Health, University of North Florida, 1 UNF Drive, Jacksonville, FL 32224 (e-mail: [email protected]).
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Abstract

Objective

This study explores the impact of economic hazard areas on hospital-based emergency departments to determine whether economically hazardous environments, characterized by the change of population, income per capita, and unemployment rate, experience a higher number of emergency room visits than areas of lower rated economic hazard risk in the United States.

Method

A cross-sectional design was used of a nationally constructed data set of hospital-based emergency departments of over 6,000 hospitals in the United States. We identified our quality outcome measure as the emergency room visits rate within a hospital service area. We created the variable by dividing the number of emergency room visits by the population of the hospital services area in which the emergency room was located.

Results

Results indicate that there is a difference in the incident rate ratio of emergency room visits between environments considered to be experiencing greater amounts of hazard, compared to lower amounts of hazard.

Conclusion

Hospital administrators and health policy-makers need to work in conjunction to focus efforts on public safety as a key objective in the delivery of emergency medical care. One crucial effort that hospital administrators need to focus on is improving emergency room capacity and efficiency as part of the disaster preparedness plan (Disaster Med Public Health Prep. 2019;13:470-475)

Keywords

economic hazardemergency departmentemergency room visitshospital capacityPoisson regression
Type
Original Research
Information
Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , June 2019 , pp. 470 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Inc. 

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