Efforts to reduce unnecessary ER visits by patients in Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled, are proliferating as states search for ways to control the soaring costs of the program. But state officials complain that their efforts are sometimes hampered by hospitals’ aggressive marketing of ERs to increase admissions and profits.
“Many hospitals are actively recruiting people to come to the ER for non-emergency reasons,” said Anthony Keck, South Carolina’s Medicaid director, citing facilities that tout their speedy ER service on highway billboards. “When you are advertising on billboards that your ER wait time is three minutes, you are not advertising to stroke and heart attack victims,” he said.
ER visits totaled 124 million in 2008, an increase of about 31 percent since 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The average wait time for treatment is 33 minutes, up from 22 minutes.
HCA, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, launched a major ER marketing campaign in the past year in Virginia, Florida, Texas and other states. The campaign includes billboards highlighting average ER waiting times and a service that provides waiting times to smartphone users.
Officials at HCA and other hospitals reject the assertion that marketing the efficiency of their ERs attracts patients who don’t belong there. “That is certainly not our intention,” said Mark Foust, a spokesman for HCA’s Virginia division, which owns 12 acute-care hospitals, including Reston Hospital Center and Dominion Hospital in Falls Church.“We’ve seen no evidence that this is driving inappropriate volume to the ER.”
Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp., a large hospital chain some of whose facilities have seen a surge of patients using the ER for primary care, recently began accepting online appointments to make it easier for patients to use the ER. It’s also promoting average waiting times on the Internet and on billboards. Spokeswoman Carol Britton says that there hasn’t been a “significant increase” in ER visits by Medicaid patients as a result of the promotion.
Medicaid officials in Washington state were so concerned by hospitals’ ER marketing that they issued new rules making it harder for hospitals to qualify for Medicaid bonus payments if they promote their ER for primary care. “They sure don’t help us when we are trying to get word out that the ER is not the place you go for primary-care diseases like treating asthma or diabetes,” said Jeffrey Thompson, chief medical officer for the state Medicaid program.
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