• Tracy L Johnson, Deborah J Rinehart, Josh Durfee, Daniel Brewer, Holly Batal, Joshua Blum, Carlos I Oronce, Paul Melinkovich, and Patricia Gabow.
• Tracy L. Johnson (tracy.johnson@dhha.org) is director of health care reform initiatives at Denver Health, in Colorado, and an assistant professor of health systems, management, and policy at the University of Colorado School of Public Health, in Aurora.
• Health Aff (Millwood). 2015 Aug 1; 34 (8): 1312-9.

AbstractPatients who accumulate multiple emergency department visits and hospital admissions, known as super-utilizers, have become the focus of policy initiatives aimed at preventing such costly use of the health care system through less expensive community- and primary care-based interventions. We conducted cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 4,774 publicly insured or uninsured super-utilizers in an urban safety-net integrated delivery system for the period May 1, 2011-April 30, 2013. Our analysis found that consistently 3 percent of adult patients met super-utilizer criteria and accounted for 30 percent of adult charges. Fewer than half of super-utilizers identified as such on May 1, 2011, remained in the category seven months later, and only 28 percent remained at the end of a year. This finding has important implications for program design and for policy makers because previous studies may have obscured this instability at the individual level. Our study also identified clinically relevant subgroups amenable to different interventions, along with their per capita utilization and costs before and after being identified as super-utilizers. Future solutions include improving predictive modeling to identify individuals likely to experience sustained levels of avoidable utilization, better classifying subgroups for whom interventions are needed, and implementing stronger program evaluation designs. Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.

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