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Emergency Department Utilization Patterns Among Physical Elder Abuse Victims in Comparison to Other Older Adults

Background: Physical elder abuse is common and has serious health consequences. Little is known, however, about the patterns of health care utilization among these victims, including whether opportunities may exist for earlier identification and intervention. Our goal was to describe Emergency Depar...

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Autores principales: Rosen, Tony, Wen, Katherine, Clark, Sunday, Elman, Alyssa, Jeng, Philip, Zhang, Yiye, Pillemer, Karl, Bao, Yuhua
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8682264/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.579
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author Rosen, Tony
Wen, Katherine
Clark, Sunday
Elman, Alyssa
Jeng, Philip
Zhang, Yiye
Pillemer, Karl
Bao, Yuhua
author_facet Rosen, Tony
Wen, Katherine
Clark, Sunday
Elman, Alyssa
Jeng, Philip
Zhang, Yiye
Pillemer, Karl
Bao, Yuhua
author_sort Rosen, Tony
collection PubMed
description Background: Physical elder abuse is common and has serious health consequences. Little is known, however, about the patterns of health care utilization among these victims, including whether opportunities may exist for earlier identification and intervention. Our goal was to describe Emergency Department (ED) utilization known physical elder abuse victims compared with non-victims. Methods: We used Medicare insurance claims to examine ED utilization patterns among a well-characterized cohort of 139 known physical elder abuse victims in the year before abuse was identified and compared this to control subjects matched on age, sex, race, and residential zip code. Results: Physical elder abuse victims were significantly more likely than control subjects to visit the ED (47.5% vs. 35.9%, p=0.01) during the year before identification and to have at least one visit for an injury-related complaint (14.4% vs. 8.3%, p=0.03). Victims were also more likely to have multiple visits (18.7% vs. 14.6%, p=0.24), visit multiple EDs (7.9% vs. 6.7%, p=0.63), or be high frequency utilizers (≥4 visits, 3.6% vs. 2.7%, p=0.58), but differences did not reach statistical significance. The most common diagnoses in ED visits among victims were: open wound of knee/ankle, exacerbation of chronic bronchitis, pneumonia, and chest pain. Conclusion: This work provides preliminary evidence that physical elder abuse victims use the ED more frequently and potentially have different patterns of utilization than other older adults. We plan to further characterize these different patterns to potentially to use them to develop tools for earlier identification.
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spelling pubmed-86822642021-12-17 Emergency Department Utilization Patterns Among Physical Elder Abuse Victims in Comparison to Other Older Adults Rosen, Tony Wen, Katherine Clark, Sunday Elman, Alyssa Jeng, Philip Zhang, Yiye Pillemer, Karl Bao, Yuhua Innov Aging Abstracts Background: Physical elder abuse is common and has serious health consequences. Little is known, however, about the patterns of health care utilization among these victims, including whether opportunities may exist for earlier identification and intervention. Our goal was to describe Emergency Department (ED) utilization known physical elder abuse victims compared with non-victims. Methods: We used Medicare insurance claims to examine ED utilization patterns among a well-characterized cohort of 139 known physical elder abuse victims in the year before abuse was identified and compared this to control subjects matched on age, sex, race, and residential zip code. Results: Physical elder abuse victims were significantly more likely than control subjects to visit the ED (47.5% vs. 35.9%, p=0.01) during the year before identification and to have at least one visit for an injury-related complaint (14.4% vs. 8.3%, p=0.03). Victims were also more likely to have multiple visits (18.7% vs. 14.6%, p=0.24), visit multiple EDs (7.9% vs. 6.7%, p=0.63), or be high frequency utilizers (≥4 visits, 3.6% vs. 2.7%, p=0.58), but differences did not reach statistical significance. The most common diagnoses in ED visits among victims were: open wound of knee/ankle, exacerbation of chronic bronchitis, pneumonia, and chest pain. Conclusion: This work provides preliminary evidence that physical elder abuse victims use the ED more frequently and potentially have different patterns of utilization than other older adults. We plan to further characterize these different patterns to potentially to use them to develop tools for earlier identification. Oxford University Press 2021-12-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8682264/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.579 Text en © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Abstracts
Rosen, Tony
Wen, Katherine
Clark, Sunday
Elman, Alyssa
Jeng, Philip
Zhang, Yiye
Pillemer, Karl
Bao, Yuhua
Emergency Department Utilization Patterns Among Physical Elder Abuse Victims in Comparison to Other Older Adults
title Emergency Department Utilization Patterns Among Physical Elder Abuse Victims in Comparison to Other Older Adults
title_full Emergency Department Utilization Patterns Among Physical Elder Abuse Victims in Comparison to Other Older Adults
title_fullStr Emergency Department Utilization Patterns Among Physical Elder Abuse Victims in Comparison to Other Older Adults
title_full_unstemmed Emergency Department Utilization Patterns Among Physical Elder Abuse Victims in Comparison to Other Older Adults
title_short Emergency Department Utilization Patterns Among Physical Elder Abuse Victims in Comparison to Other Older Adults
title_sort emergency department utilization patterns among physical elder abuse victims in comparison to other older adults
topic Abstracts
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8682264/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igab046.579
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