From RAND
With media reports building, again, by the day about an overcrowding crisis in the jammed and underfunded emergency rooms across Los Angeles county, the folks in Santa Monica offer another piece to the health dire care puzzle, asserting that as many as 17% of the ER visits nationwide could be handled, instead, at retail medical clinics or private urgent care centers. If this were to occur, there also would be an estimated $4.4 billion saving in annual health care costs for the country, they say. They note their research comes with a caveat or two because it's unclear whether existing clinics, often manned by nurse practitioners at pharmacies, groceries and even some mega-retailers, actually offer the care hours to take on as many potential patients as envisioned. Still, previous studies of ERs, retail clinics and urgent care facilities have shown that the private facilities certainly end up costing less for care that, generally speaking, turns out to be as satisfactory as that given after loooong waits in emergency rooms; it is, however, unclear whether patients possess the discernment to know the medical limits of the kind of care given at retail clinics and urgent care facilities. But certainly if greater emergency room capacity could be freed up, particularly with affordable shifts to acceptable private medical facilities, that could be huge for not only patients in major, sudden medical need but also for taxpayers who so frequently bear the brunt of the huge cost of providing lesser care in ERs designed for trauma response and the desperately ill.
Sizable percentage of emergency room cases could be shifted to other facilities
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