Imaging in emergency department rises when patients are seen by non-physician practitioners

DOTmed November 17, 2022
John R. Fischer

U.S. emergency departments saw imaging rates rise when patients were treated by non-physician practitioners, rather than only doctors.

From 2005 to 2020, 5.3% more imaging studies were performed on Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries who together had 16,922,274 ED visits, as recorded in a new Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute study.

Author Eric Christensen, director of economic and health services research at the Neiman Institute, says this equates to more than one million imaging studies annually when applied to the roughly 20 million ED visits that occur each year among this patient population.

“Although we focused on Medicare, there are approximately 130 million annual ED visits in the United States, so this figure could be substantially higher,” he said in a...

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