Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Emergency departments (ED) are being overused. The public health significance of EDs being too crowded includes both health and/or financial consequences for the patients, staff, hospital system, region, community, and tax payers. EDs are overburdened for many reasons, and most are related to what is perceived as an emergency, issues in accessing other care, or revisiting the same ED because of a reoccurring issue. Campaigns have focused on reducing crowding and the number of unnecessary ED patients, some successful and some not. Multiple interventions focus on different tactics and methods to achieve the results that are desired. These are reviewed in this paper. An emerging communication channel with potential to change behavior related to receipt of health care is text messaging. Text message campaigns have become an excellent channel to communicate to members within a health system. During the summer of 2017, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Health Plan’s Population Health Engagement and Optimization (PHEO) team created a text message campaign to reduce ED visits among a subset of their Medicaid-insured population. The intervention ultimately changed its goals due to the relatively small number of individuals in the target population and the variety of factors beyond text messaging that influence ED utilization. The primary focus is now the introduction and use of existing UPMC resources to reduce ED visits. The campaign is currently being reviewed for approval, with a launch planned April 30, 2018.
Author: Andrew Sherow
Language: English
Subfield: Emergency Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2921451724