State eyes diverting addicts from crowded ERs
Chronic overcrowding at some Boston emergency rooms could be alleviated by giving more addicts and behavioral health patients access to primary care or urgent care, the state’s secretary of Health and Human Services said yesterday.
“It’s the access issue. People are going to emergency rooms for what should be primary or urgent care,” Marylou Sudders said on Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program. “I would like to see us create more urgent care centers. There’s not an urgent care center in Massachusetts that sees people with behavioral health or addiction issues.”
A Herald special report this week revealed that emergency patients at Boston Medical Center and Brigham and Women’s Hospital wait nearly an hour on average to be seen, twice the national average of 30 minutes, according to Medicare and Medicaid data.
Expanded Medicaid coverage under Obamacare has exacerbated the problem, with hospitals forced to operate at nearly full capacity to make up for the lower profits from those patients, analysts say.
Sudders said today the crowding could be eased with a focus on getting “nonurgent issues out of the emergency room and into primary care or health centers, and (using) the ER for what you and I would think of as real emergencies.”
The secretary also cited dental care as a condition that should be diverted from ERs.
However, she noted there is a positive side to the surge of overdose patients in area ERs.
“We have a higher rate of people with addictions being transported to emergency rooms. That’s not a bad thing because someone is being NARCANned and discovered,” Sudders said. “For me, that provides an opportunity to change someone’s trajectory.”
Expanding access to primary care and urgent care, as opposed to a reliance on emergency rooms, will require federal support, Sudders said.
“Expanding primary care, expanding someone’s ability to get in to see a primary care physician, coverage that helps pay for it — we have to make sure we get the right care at the right time and the right place,” she said, “and that’s a conversation I hope we can have with Congress and within our own state.”