Abstract
Background The Affordable Care Act has added millions of new Medicaid enrollees to the health care system. These patients account for a large proportion of emergency department (ED) utilization. Objective Our aim was to characterize this population and their ED use at a national level. Methods We used the 2010 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) to describe demographics and clinical characteristics of nonelderly adults (≥18 years old and ≤64 years old) with Medicaid-covered ED visits. We defined frequent ED users as individuals who make ≥4 ED visits/year and business hours as 8 am to 5 pm. We used descriptive statistics to describe the epidemiology of Medicaid-covered ED visits. Results NHAMCS included 21,800 ED visits by nonelderly adults in 2010, of which 5,659 (24.09%) were covered by Medicaid insurance. Most ED visits covered by Medicaid were made by patients who are young (25 and 44 years old) and female (67.95%; 95% confidence interval [CI] 66.00-69.89). A large proportion of the ED visits covered by Medicaid were revisits within 72 h (14.66%; 95% CI 9.13-20.19) and from frequent ED users (32.32%; 95% CI 24.29-40.35). Almost half of all ED visits covered by Medicaid occurred during business hours (45.44%; 95% CI 43.45-47.43). Conclusions The vast majority of Medicaid enrollees who used the ED were young females, with a large proportion of visits occurring during business hours. Almost one-third of all visits were from frequent ED users.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 984-989 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Journal of Emergency Medicine |
Volume | 49 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2015 |
Keywords
- Medicaid
- emergency visits
- frequent use
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Emergency Medicine