I’ve seen quite a bit of feedback on social media regarding this research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine.
This study evaluated, using National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey data, the incidence of hospital admission stratified by triage Emergency Severity Index. They analyzed 59,293 representative visits from the sample and found 7.5% of them, on a weighted basis, were categorized as “non-urgent” – an ESI level 5 or presumed equivalent. The typical assumption regarding these non-urgent visits is they represent inappropriate Emergency Department utilization. This study found, however:
“… a nontrivial proportion of ED visits that were deemed nonurgent arrived by ambulance, received diagnostic services, had procedures performed, and were admitted to the hospital, including to critical care units.”
There are always limitations regarding the NHAMCS data, particularly with missing and imputed data. Based on this, I tend to feel these data lack face validity. The weighted incidence of admission for non-urgent patients was 4.4% compared with 12.8% of urgent visits, while 0.7% of non-urgent visits were to critical care units compared with 1.3% of urgent visits. I certainly do not see similar relative proportions of admission, and then to critical care, for level 5 patients in my multiple practice environments.
Regardless, the general implication made by these authors is probably reasonable, refuting usage of ESI triage level 5 to accurately represent inappropriate Emergency Department visits. However, left equally unstated, is an acknowledgement that ESI also fails to accurately categorize urgent visits – which ties to the rhetoric of trying to conflate “non-urgent” as “inappropriate and “urgent” as “appropriate”.
ESI, as currently implemented, will not be a reliable tool for directing patients to other sources of care – but, with some fuzziness, probably still gives a reasonable estimate of the overall burden of inappropriate ED visits for some policy applications.
“Urgent Care Needs Among Nonurgent Visits to the Emergency Department”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27089549