Penn Author Calls for Better Primary Care for Medicaid Patients to Curb Unnecessary Emergency Room Visits

PHILADELPHIA – Although a goal of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act was to provide Medicaid patients with a source of nonemergency care outside of hospital emergency departments (EDs), researchers suggest that these newly enrolled patients will likely continue to look to EDs for treatment of chronic diseases and other nonemergency issues, despite state attempts to impose fees on ED visits. Health policy researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Institute of Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, suggest in a new Perspective published in the New England Journal of Medicine that patient-centered medical homes may be more effective in reducing the number of Medicare patients seeking nonemergency care in EDs than increasing the cost of the visits.