These two ERs want to put an end to it:
After evaluating patients who come to the emergency room, nurse practitioners or physician’s assistants will inform those with nonurgent symptoms that they can seek treatment at a specific community health clinic.Patients who insist on staying will have to pay a $150 deposit before being treated in the emergency room or an $80 deposit to be seen in urgent care centers at LBJ and Ben Taub.
These are comparable to private minor emergency centers that treat non-life-threatening trauma and illness.
(via a reader tip by Ain’t Chicken.)
Related posts:
- Are emergency physicians best served to staff urgent care centers?
- Saving emergency care with primary care
- The primary care shortage in Maryland
- Why more emergency departments are shutting down and becoming urgent care centers
- Will more primary care doctors keep patients out of the ER?
- Newsflash: Primary care works
- ER visits and health care costs rise in Massachusetts due to lack of primary care access
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{ 2 comments }
Why is the er doing this? They make money by seeing these assholes that come in for primary care…not only that, but a few of the people that these np’s and nurses send out will have life-threatening illness, and then they will be screwed big-time!
You’re clearly not familiar with healthcare economics.
ERs are HUGE money-losers for hospitals. Coupled with an overcrowding problem, it’s a real issue.
From the article, which you obviously didn’t read:
“In recent years, emergency rooms at local public and private hospitals regularly have gone on “drive-by status,” requiring ambulances to divert seriously ill or injured patents to other facilities.
Drive-by status has become frequent, in part, because so many patients with nonurgent symptoms seek care at emergency rooms, concluded Save Our ERs in a report two years ago. Save Our ERs was a coalition of regional leaders in medicine, business and government that advocated changing local health care policy to help alleviate emergency room overcrowding.
Last year, Ben Taub’s emergency room was on drive-by status 42 percent of the time and LBJ’s, 55 percent.”
Emphasis mine.
A huge contributor to the problem is this:
“More than half of the 166,000 people who went to LBJ and Ben Taub emergency rooms last year could have received appropriate treatment elsewhere, said James Hearn, assistant administrator at LBJ, who is leading the effort to divert nonurgent patients from emergency rooms.
“Accessing the emergency room for the sniffles is not appropriate. We will be teaching people to navigate our system and use our clinics,” Hearn said.
He said patients come to emergency rooms for sore throats and minor stomachaches, and some bring children for immunization shots.”
Those are not appropriate uses for the emergency room.
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