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Emergency room use is often a marker for having complex health care needs, or having other
unmet needs through other health care services. It’s very costly care, so we want to understand
what takes people to the emergency department, to see if their care could be better managed
in other ways. People with disabilities--although they comprise only 17 percept of the working
age population--they used 40 percent of the ED visits. So they represented 40 percent
of ED use on an annual basis, which is pretty dramatic. We found that there were several
factors that contributed to their ED use, including access to primary care and the medications
that they needed, the complexity of their health care profile…so they tend to have
multiple chronic conditions and acute conditions, and the chronic conditions tend to accumulate
over time. It’s likely that some of those visits could be better treated through coordinated
care, better information-sharing through all of the health care providers that would see
a particular individual. That would help all of us, but it is particularly salient for
people with chronic conditions and disabilities because they have much more complex health
care profiles. They have more going on.