Preventable ed visits7/30/2023 ![]() “In the U.S., palliative care is typically associated with patients very close to the end of life, but it can go hand in hand with curative treatment,” Trueger says. Palliative care for people living with a serious illness, such as cancer, is designed to enhance a patient’s current care by focusing on quality of life for them and their family. Seth Trueger, an emergency medicine physician at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital Emergency Department in Chicago and digital media editor at JAMA Network Open. ![]() “Palliative care can be a solution to help keep patients potentially out of the ED,” says N. Patients with ongoing pain related to their cancer diagnosis or treatment, for example, should consider asking their doctor for a referral to palliative care. Meanwhile, some cancer symptoms may be better managed with a proactive approach. It will serve as a backup to the written instructions patients receive when they are discharged from the hospital, which are also posted in their electronic patient portal. ![]() The app will include fall detection and GPS tracking to help patients quickly locate the nearest urgent care center. The app will feature personalized discharge instructions, including signs and symptoms that are likely to occur in the next hours and days, to help patients with cancer proactively track, prevent and manage their symptoms and decide when to return to the hospital or seek care at the nearest urgent care center. To help patients with cancer everywhere track their signs and symptoms at home, Alishahi Tabriz and his team are piloting a HIPAA-compliant remote symptom management app they hope to make commercially available. It’s the health system’s responsibility to differentiate your symptoms.” If you feel something isn’t right, seek care. “You shouldn’t be the judge of your signs and symptoms. “There shouldn’t be any burden on the patient’s shoulders to reduce potentially preventable ED visits,” says Amir Alishahi Tabriz, the study’s lead researcher and a physician and health services researcher at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. It does not question patient decisions about getting care. The study highlights the need for cancer care programs to devise ways to better manage cancer treatment complications, such as pain, in outpatient settings. The definition doesn’t account for patients’ access to other care, such as urgent care or primary care. The researchers used the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ definition of potentially preventable ED visits, which is based on billing code data for conditions, such as anemia, fever and dehydration. The study evaluated national ED admission billing code data from the annual Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. Of those visits, 51.6% were for reasons such as anemia, nausea, fever, dehydration, neutropenia, diarrhea, pain, pneumonia, sepsis and emesis, which are considered potentially preventable through regular care. The study, which evaluated 35.5 million ED visits among patients with cancer, found that the number of visits per year rose from 1.8 million in 2012 to 3.2 million in 2019. EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT (ED) visits for cancer patients are on the rise, and more than half of those visits are potentially avoidable, according to a study published in the January 2023 issue of JAMA Network Open.
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