Identification of Emergency Department Visits in Medicare Administrative Claims: Approaches and Implications.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Administrative claims data sets are often used for emergency care research and policy investigations of healthcare resource utilization, acute care practices, and evaluation of quality improvement interventions. Despite the high profile of emergency department (ED) visits in analyses using administrative claims, little work has evaluated the degree to which existing definitions based on claims data accurately captures conventionally defined hospital-based ED services. We sought to construct an operational definition for ED visitation using a comprehensive Medicare data set and to compare this definition to existing operational definitions used by researchers and policymakers.

Methods

We examined four operational definitions of an ED visit commonly used by research

SUBMITTER: Venkatesh AK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5905698 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature