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Patients with acute psychiatric illnesses often board in emergency departments (EDs) for hours or even days, potentially resulting in lost revenue because new patients can't be seen in those rooms. To explore the financial impact of an emergency psychiatric assessment, treatment, and healing (EmPATH) unit, researchers retrospectively compared revenues during 6-month periods before and after the introduction of such a unit at an academic medical center in Iowa.
The ED revenue associated with introduction of the unit was estimated by taking the difference in the number of patients who eloped, left without being seen (LWBS), left against medical advice (AMA), or transferred, and multiplying it by the average revenue for those patient's triage a…