Annals of emergency medicine
-
Emergency department (ED) evaluations for syncope are common, representing 1.3 million annual US visits and $2 billion in related hospitalizations. Despite evidence supporting risk stratification and outpatient management, variation in syncope hospitalization rates persist. We sought to develop a new quality measure for very low-risk adult ED patients with syncope that could be applied to administrative data. ⋯ In summary, our novel syncope quality measure can assess variation in low-value hospitalizations for unexplained syncope. The application of this measure could improve the value of syncope care.
-
The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has underscored the need to understand health care in a regional context. However, there are multiple definitions of health care regions available for conducting geospatial analyses. In this study, we compare the novel Pittsburgh Atlas, which defined regions for emergency care, with the existing definitions of regions, counties, and the Dartmouth Atlas, with respect to nonemergent acute medical conditions using pneumonia admissions. ⋯ Because the Pittsburgh Atlas also has the benefit of respecting state and county boundaries, the use of this definition may have improved policy applicability without sacrificing accuracy in defining health care regions for acute medical conditions.