Boarding, Bed-Hiding, and Other Dangers of Appearing Poor
posted by Frank Pasquale
The US’s troubled ER’s came into media focus again recently as a woman waiting for care collapsed and was ignored by hospital personnel:
Zachary F. Meisel and Jesse M. Pines have done a great job exposing how our health care finance system plays an important role in such tragedies:
[W]hat’s largely missing from this story is the likely cause of Green’s pulmonary embolism. The answer lies in a . . . systematic and widespread danger in hospital care: E.R. waits. Why was Green sitting and waiting while blood pooled in her legs? Despite increasing evidence that crowded E.R.s can be hazardous to your health, hospitals have incentives to keep their E.R. patients waiting. As a result, there has been an explosion in E.R. wait times over the past few years, even for those who are the sickest.
A major cause for E.R. crowding is the hospital practice of boarding inpatients in emergency departments. This happens when patients who come to the E.R. need to be admitted overnight. If there are no inpatient beds in the hospital (or no extra inpatient nurses on duty that day) then the patient stays in the E.R. long past the completion of the initial emergency work. This is what happened to Green, and it has become widespread and common. The problem is that boarding shifts E.R. resources away from the new patients in the waiting room. . . .
What hospital would promote such a practice? Potentially, those that profit more from boarding, particularly in poorer communities with high numbers of uninsured and Medicaid patients. Imagine you run a hospital. There are two competing sources for inpatient beds. The first source is patients who come in through direct and transfer admissions. They are more likely to come with private insurance and need procedural care, both of which maximize profits. The second source is E.R. patients, who are more likely to be uninsured or have pittance-paying Medicaid and less likely to need high-margin procedures. Do the math: If you fill your hospital with the direct and transfer admissions and maroon the E.R. patients for long periods, you make more money.
The whole point of EMTALA, the law that mandates treatment of ER’s, was to make them a zone within the hospital where ability to pay did not affect quality of care. But given that it was an unfunded mandate, it has had a predictable effect: to gradually starve that one zone of egalitarianism of resources that get diverted to other, more profitable parts of the hospital.
July 24, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Posted in: Health Law
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Responses (1)
A.J. Sutter - July 25, 2008 at 10:48 am
What about the practice of some ERs diverting patients, so that other ERs have to pick up the slack? Couldn’t that have been a reason the ER she wound up in was overcrowded, or at least a contributing factor? The “profit incentive” explanation sounds too simplistic to be plausible as the sole cause. And it’s even presented in the article as a speculation.
I’m concerned that regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, people recently have a tendency to apply a mechanistic, financial incentive determinism to every problem they analyze. “Doing the math” is a substitute for real inquiry. What’s the evidence that this was the sole or even primary cause of this incident?
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