Emergency Department Treat-and-Release Visits for Sickle Cell Disease: A sIgn of acute events to come

Patients with sickle cell disease have very high rates of rehospitalization, with rates as high as 40% for young adults. Many institutions have invested significant resources to utilize an inpatient hospitalization as a trigger to alter care and prevent further hospital utilization. While this focus on hospitalizations is important, there has been little attention given to return visits following treat-and-release emergency department (ED) visits. It has been shown that patients with sickle cell disease have high use of acute care resources, including the ED. Given that only half of ED visits by patients with sickle cell disease result in an inpatient stay, it may be possible to use an ED visit as a trigger for improved care rather than waiting for an inpatient hospitalization. We hypothesized that patients with sickle cell disease who were treated and released from the ED would have high rates of return for acute care utilization, both to the ED and the inpatient unit, within 14 days. We further hypothesized that young adults and those with public insurance would have the highest return for acute care utilization rates. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using 2005 and 2006 State Emergency Department Databases and State Inpatient Databases. The data are from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), a Federal-State-Industry partnership sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Data for all sickle cell-related ED visits and hospitalizations within the following eight states (AZ, CA, FL, MA, MO, SC, TN, and NY) were extracted for each patient. One-third of patients with sickle cell disease in the United States live within these states. All sickle cell related visits were linked via encrypted person-level identifiers to allow linkage of record level information, thus clustering visits by patient. Each treat-and-release ED visit served as an index visit; all subsequent ED treat-and-release visits and inpatient hospitalizations (whether through the ED or not) were tracked for periods of 7 and 14 days. ED treat-and-release visits within the seven days following a hospital discharge were excluded from being index visits. Results: A total of 12,109 patients with sickle cell disease made 39,775 ED treat-and-release visits during the two-year study period. Of the index ED treat-and-release visits, 4,162 (34.4%) children (ages 1–17 yrs) made 8,636 (21.7%) visits compared to 4,166 (34.4%) 18–30 year olds who made 17,070 (42.8%) ED treat-and-release visits. Overall, 16,731 (42.1%) of the ED treat-and-release visits had either an inpatient hospitalization or another ED treat-and-release visit within 14 days of the index ED visit; 39.7% of those return visits were inpatient hospitalizations meaning that 16.7% of ED treat-and-release visits are followed by an inpatient hospitalization within 14 days. Analyzing the 42.1% return visit rate by age and payer revealed that 49.0% of ED treat-and-release visits by 18 – 30 year old patients resulted in return visits compared to 24.7% of children and 38.6% of 46–64 year olds. 46.5% of ED treat-and-release visits by those with public insurance resulted in a return visit compared to 32.2% of visits by those with private insurance and 35.0% of those who were uninsured. As the timing of return visits might direct the intervention, we also evaluated 7 day return visits. Of the 16,731 return visits within 14 days, 12,561 (75.1%) occurred in the first 7 days; 41.1% of the 7 day return visits were inpatient hospitalizations meaning that 13% of ED treat-and-release visits were followed by an inpatient hospitalization within 7 days. Conclusions: A significant proportion of patients with sickle cell disease return for acute care following an ED treat-and-release visit, with young adults and those with public insurance having the highest rates of return visits. A high percentage of those return visits are hospitalizations. Given these findings, ED treat-and-release visits should serve as a trigger to focus enhanced outpatient comprehensive care on these patients in order to prevent a subsequent inpatient hospitalization and to ultimately improve care for patients with sickle cell disease.

No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.