Variation in Hospital Admission Rates for Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder Emergency Department Visits in 11 States

The authors examined patterns in hospital admission rates for patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD)-related visit to an emergency department (ED).

The authors identified 116,928 ED visits for SSD across 1,071 hospitals in an 11-state sample drawn from the 2020 State Emergency Department Databases and State Inpatient Databases. The distribution of hospital-level admission rates was described by using a finite mixture model. Hospital- and county-level characteristics were compared across hospitals with low, medium, or high SSD admission shares.

Admission shares for patients with an SSD ED visit were highly variable and multimodal across hospitals. Although the overall mean admission share for patient ED visits with a primary SSD diagnosis was 56.6% (95% CI=53.0%-60.2%), the mean admission share was 5.6% (95% CI=4.8%-6.4%) in the lowest quintile and was 95.4% (95% CI=94.6%-96.3%) in the highest quintile. The presence of psychiatric beds in a hospital was associated with increased odds of admission (OR=2.56, 95% CI=1.83-3.59). A hospital's size, mental health visit volume, urbanicity, availability of psychiatric consultation, emergency mental health services, and outpatient mental health services, as well as county-level inpatient beds, were not significantly associated with admission rates.

Hospital admission rates for patients with an SSD ED visit varied widely, and the presence of inpatient psychiatric beds was positively associated with admission. These findings raise equity concerns by suggesting that variation in inpatient psychiatric bed availability contributes to ED disposition of patients with an SSD-related visit.