Care Alert Program in Chronic Emergency Department Using Patients: Expanded Study

The Care Alert Program (CAP) is designed to help navigate encounters with patients who are high utilizers of Emergency Department (ED) resources. The CAP intends to address the needs of this challenging patient population by designing individualized care plans that are approved by a multidisciplinary committee. The patient populations that frequently use ED resources often have chronic medical conditions, a poor understanding of their conditions, unrealistic expectations regarding treatment, a lack of outpatient resources, and present with multiple complaints when using ED resources.

The CAP was adopted by our facility in the spring of 2020. The present study is an expanded version of a previously published pilot project conducted in 2020-2021, in which we demonstrated a decrease in both ED visits and admission rates.

In this expanded study, we reviewed 46 CAP cases and determined the mean percentage of patient ED visits decreased by 42.3% in this patient population. Average hospital admission rates decreased by 50.4% during the initial 8 months after enrollment into the CAP.

Implementing the CAP is an effective way reduce hospital admission rate and average ED visits amongst high utilizers.