Emergency Physicians Vary in How Many Patients They Admit

Variability in medical care can indicate opportunities for cost savings or quality improvement. Increasingly, variability is becoming a topic for research and may soon be a target of incentives and penalties. These authors analyzed a large sample of emergency department (ED) encounters at three Washington, D.C.–area hospitals in the same system, to measure variability in emergency physicians' admission decisions.

The data analyzed covered 89 physicians and nearly 400,000 ED visits. The authors controlled for potential confounders, including hospital, mode of arrival, triage acuity rank, and physician characteristics. They found that physician's admission rates varied from 21% to 49%.