Background: A small proportion of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) consume a disproportionate amount of health care resources, with most of these spent on unplanned care in emergency room (ER) and hospital visits. Interventions in those at high risk in the outpatient setting could reduce the need for future inpatient care. We sought to describe the characteristics predictive of high health care utilization within 1 year after an initial IBD clinic encounter.
Methods: This was a retrospective study of new IBD patients seen at the outpatient clinics of 2 tertiary IBD centers in the United States. Baseline sociodemographic and clinical characteristics were collected, and the number of IBD-related ER and hospital visits were recorded over the 1-year period after the initial clinic encounter. Patients with ≥2 visits (high utilizers) were compared with those with no visits.
Results: Of the 735 patients included in the final analysis, 106 (14.4%) were high utilizers, and they had a mean of 2.9 visits (maximum = 10) in the 1 year after their initial encounter. In multivariate analysis, insurance coverage through medical assistance (odds ratio [OR] 3.57; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.38-9.20), steroid use (OR 1.83; 95% CI, 1.11-3.04), short inflammatory bowel disease questionnaire score <50 (OR 2.29; 95% CI, 1.23-4.27), and current ostomy (OR 4.82; 95% CI, 1.51-15.37) were independently associated with high utilization.
Conclusions: Multidisciplinary care and resources should be preferentially channeled towards new clinic patients with severe disease and on medical assistance, as this could reduce future inpatient visits and result in cost savings.
Keywords: costs; emergency room visit; health care utilization; hospitalization; inflammatory bowel disease.
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