Original articleEmergency Department Visits Increase in Transition-Age Patients Empaneled in a Primary Care Network at a Major Academic Medical Center
Section snippets
Setting
We conducted a cross-sectional, single-center study of transition-aged patients aged 12–29 empaneled within 10 primary care clinics at Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, OR. Oregon Health & Sciences University is a 522-bed teaching hospital, biomedical research facility, and level 1 trauma center. Of the 10 associated primary care clinics, 2 are pediatric clinics, 1 is an internal medicine clinic, 4 are family medicine clinics, 2 are combined family medicine/internal medicine
Patient demographics
In total, 19,989 patients between the ages of 12 and 29 at a single metropolitan health system contributed to our analysis (Table 1). The mean age of the cohort was 21.0 ± 5.4 years with 57.7% women (n = 11,533).
About 9.9% (n = 1,975) of the cohort had one or more HRC. These included patients with IDD (n = 803; 40.7%); seizure disorders (n = 504; 25.5%); congenital cardiac disease (n = 281; 14.2%); current, or history of, cancer (n = 176; 8.9%); type 1 diabetes (n = 152; 7.7%); rheumatologic
Discussion
Our findings add more details to an existing literature examining care utilization among transition-aged patients [[16], [17], [18],21,22]. Our results and descriptive visualizations show a consistent increase in ED visits in late adolescence and early adulthood across predictive variables, reinforced with age 18–23 having a large estimate independent of other predictors in statistical modeling.
As Table 3 shows, there are similar condition-specific estimates with or without the single-morbidity
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Cited by (1)
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2023, Journal of Emergency Nursing
Conflicts of interest: No real or perceived conflicts of interest reported for all authors.