The Emergency Department is a land of uncertainty. Generally a time-compressed, zero-continuity environment with limited resources, we frequently need to make relatively rapid decisions based on incomplete information. The goal, in general, is to treat and disposition patients in an advantageous fashion to prevent morbidity and mortality, while minimizing the costs and other harms.
The consequence of this confluence of factors leads, unfortunately, to a handful of patients who meet their unfortunate end following discharge. A Kaiser Permanente Emergency Department cohort analysis found 0.05% died within 7 days of discharge, and identified a few interesting risk factors regarding their outcomes. This new article, in the BMJ, describes the outcomes of a Medicare cohort following discharge – and finds both similarities and differences.
One notable difference, and a focus of the authors, is that 0.12% of patients discharged from the Emergency Department died within 7 days. This is a much larger proportion than the Kaiser cohort, however, the Medicare population is obviously a much older cohort with greater comorbidities. Then, they found similarities regarding the risks for death – most prominently, “altered mental status”. The full accounting of clinical features is described in the figure below:
Then, there were some system-level factors as well. Potentially, rural emergency departments and those with low annual volumes contributed in their multivariate model to increased risk of death. This data set is insufficient to draw any specific conclusions regarding these contributing factors, but it raises questions for future research. In general, however, this is interesting – and not terribly surprising data – even if it is hard to identify specific operational interventions based on these broad strokes.
“Early death after discharge from emergency departments: analysis of national US insurance claims data”
http://www.bmj.com/content/356/bmj.j239