Patient and Visit Characteristics of Pediatric Patients With High-frequency Low-acuity Emergency Department Visits

Pediatric patients account for a disproportionate number of low-acuity emergency department (ED) visits. The aim of this study is to describe pediatric patient and visit characteristics for high-frequency users for low-acuity visits.

This was a retrospective cohort study of children presenting to a tertiary care pediatric ED and an affiliated community ED, over a 2-year period, with at least 10 low-acuity visits. Twenty patients with the highest number of visits were classified as "superusers." We analyzed patient data from the larger sample of high-frequency users and visit specific data from superuser visits. IBM SPSS Statistics 25 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL) was used to perform descriptive statistics and to summarize demographic and visit specific variables.

We identified 181 high-frequency users with a mean number of visits of 14.3 ± 4.3 and a subpopulation of 20 superusers accounting for 434 visits. The majority of high-frequency users (89%) identified as African American and had public insurance (96.1%). Many patients received primary care affiliated with the home institution. In the first year of the study, 50.3% of high-frequency users were infants younger than 1 year at the index visit and 47.4% of superusers were infants at the index visit.Superuser visits were evenly distributed among seasons and the majority of visits occurred during the weekdays (70.7%). The majority of visits were for medical complaints (86.6%) and almost half (47.6%) resulted in some testing (24.9%) or treatment (30.6%); however, only 1.4% resulted in hospital admission.

In our sample, most high-frequency low-acuity ED patients were infants, African American and have public insurance. Many are seen during clinic hours and are paneled at affiliated clinics. Among superusers, the majority of the visits did not require any testing, intervention, or treatment.