How well do we know our patients? Identifying the correlation between emergency medicine physicians’ and patients’ beliefs regarding patients’ underlying reasons for seeking emergency care.
Ruben Troncoso MD MPH, Eric Garfinkel DO
Johns Hopkins Emergency Medicine
The modern US Emergency Department (ED) serves a multitude of roles. Some patients come for emergent or non-emergent medical issues, such as a gunshot wound or diabetes. Others come affected by multitudes of factors that make up the socioeconomic determinants of health, needing assistance with shelter, food, or substance use. What brings a patient to the ED can be multifactorial, and these complex layers of patient priorities may not be communicated effectively to the physician. These complexities may lead to a discrepancy between the patient’s priorities for the ED visit and the physician’s priorities when creating the care plan, leading to patient dissatisfaction and overuse of resources.
This team aims to utilize a 6-question survey to identify the level of concordance between patients’ reasons for presenting to the ED and their provider’s perceptions of these reasons. With results from these studies, the study team hopes their work can help lay the foundation for future efforts aimed at established patient-centered care in the ED.