In recent decades, clinician billing practices for emergency department (ED) visits have come under scrutiny as the proportion of visits in the US billed as “high intensity” has
grown.
Alexander Janke and coauthors use an all-payer national sample of EDs in the US to describe overall trends in high-intensity billing among ED visits that do not result in hospitalizations.
Janke and coauthors report that the proportion of treat-and-release ED visits in the US with high-intensity billing grew from about 4.8 percent in 2006 to 19.2
percent in 2019.
Their analysis also shows “changes in the types of patients being treated and released from the ED with clinically undifferentiated but potentially more serious conditions, such as chest pain and abdominal pain, accounting for a greater share in 2019 than less serious conditions such as sprains and strains.”
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