One of the biggest resource drains on the ER. There is no continuity of care, and studies often get repeated and overlapped:

Across town, at Detroit Receiving Hospital, dozens of patients like Weiss-Frezzell show up every day, consuming doctors’ and nurses’ time, requiring costly medical tests and creating persistent frustration for medical staffs who struggle to treat pain-riddled patients but try to avoid giving them unnecessary medication.

In some cases, drugs aren’t the best remedy for pain. And in other cases, addiction is the motivation for seeking medication.

The problem became so bad with one patient, who would visit each of the Detroit Medical Center’s three hospital emergency rooms in search of drugs, that the three ER chiefs held a special meeting to discuss how to handle the case.

“We have these patients where we see them and say, ‘Here they come again,'”‚” said Dr. Patricia Wilkerson-Uddyback, an emergency physician at Receiving. “But we still try to provide them with the best standard of care. It gets hard to balance between treating a medical condition and not contributing to a possible addiction.”