Measuring Medicaid Expansion’s Impact on an Academic Medical Center’s Emergency Department

Medicaid expansion’s impact has been studied on national and statewide levels with respect to the patient outcomes, access to health services and uncompensated care. The objective of this study was to examine the effect of the Medicaid expansion on an emergency department (ED) at a large, academic center by evaluating changes in total charges, services rendered, types of providers, number of visits, and length of stay. Findings from this study include more males frequenting the ED for health services and a bottleneck in operations with an average waiting time in the ED increasing by 17%. Additionally, Medicaid recipients required non-emergent services that could be delivered by primary care providers, albeit at the ED, with average total charges for Emergency Medicine services seeing a statistically significant reduction with increases in average total charges for Family Medicine. While Medicaid expansion provided more individuals with coverage, a large academic medical center adapted in concordance.