NYU ED Utilization Analysis

The Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council Foundation (DFWHC Foundation) preempted the state of Texas for data collection of hospital outpatient encounters beginning in 2006 with 40 hospitals participating. From the start the DFWHC Foundation has been collecting outpatient emergency room data to complement its inpatient emergency room data.

Emergency room (ER) data is valuable as hospitals try to determine ways to efficiently treat patients while not wasting crucial resources on encounters that could have been treated in a primary care. The Information and Quality Services Center started searching for ways to enhance the data and discovered an algorithm developed at New York University (NYU). The NYU Algorithm categorizes outpatient ER cases in a way that identifies avoidable visits. The goal is to examine the number of true emergencies and how many could be handled by a primary care physician.

With the DFWHC Foundation’s MyIQ Analytics tool, facilities can mine data down to the case-level to find ways to mitigate non-emergency visits to the emergency department. Many organizations use this data to track changes over time to plan new clinics. The graphic below is an example of how the data can be tracked by county to determine the need for care. During the second quarter of 2012, metroplex counties had more than 100,000 potentially avoidable ER visits, meaning there could be as much as 500,000 visits a year that could have been managed in a physician’s office for less cost.


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