Cross-sectional analysis quantifies health care contact in older adults after ED visits, revealing gaps in care.
Key Points
This analysis aims to quantify health care contact days following treat-and-release emergency department visits among older adults and to examine their demographic and clinical characteristics.
Conducted a pooled cross-sectional analysis using 2016–2021 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey data.
Included beneficiaries aged 65 years or older with treat-and-release ED visits.
Applied zero-inflated Poisson regression to estimate health care contact likelihood and intensity.
22.5% of ED visits led to institutional health care contact within 30 days, while 84.4% resulted in ambulatory contact.
Average contact days post-ED visit was 4.3 (3.0 ambulatory, 1.3 institutional).
Older adults with ≥ 2 chronic conditions had higher odds of both institutional (OR: 1.46, 95% CI: 1.28–1.66) and ambulatory contact (OR: 1.44, 95% CI: 1.25–1.66), while those with dementia had reduced odds of ambulatory contact (OR: 0.51, 95% CI: 0.37–0.72).