Comparison of outcomes in emergency department revisiting patients before and after coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic

Background and importance The outbreak of COVID-19 challenged the global health system and specifically impacted the emergency departments (EDs). Studying the quality indicators of ED care under COVID-19 has been a necessary task, and ED revisits have been used as an indicator to monitor ED performance. Objectives The study investigated whether discrepancies existed among ED revisiting cases before and after COVID-19 and whether the COVID-19 epidemic was a predictor of poor outcomes of ED revisits. Design Retrospective study. Settings and participants We used electronic health records data from a tertiary medical center. Data of patients with 72-h ED revisit after the COVID-19 epidemic were collected from February 2020 to June 2020 and compared with those of patients before COVID-19, from February 2019 to June 2019. Outcome measures and analysis The investigated outcomes included hospital admission, ICU admission, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and subsequent inhospital mortality. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were used to identify independent predictors of 72-h ED revisit outcomes. Main results In total, 1786 patients were enrolled in our study – 765 in the COVID group and 1021 in the non-COVID group. Compared with the non-COVID group, patients in the COVID group were younger (53.9 vs. 56.1 years old; P = 0.002) and more often female (66.1% vs. 47.3%; P
Source: European Journal of Emergency Medicine - Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research