ER doctors have little sense of cost of care they provide

If you or a loved one had to visit a hospital emergency room, would you have any sense of what your care might cost? Neither do most doctors and nurses.

Researchers recently asked 441 emergency medicine clinicians to estimate the cost of care for three common scenarios: A 35-year-old woman with abdominal pain; a 57-year-old man with labored breathing and a 7-year-old boy with a sore throat. In each case, doctors had a sense of the patients’ medical history, physical exams and test results as well as a summary of treatments provided.

Participants were asked to choose the correct price range for each patient’s scenario: less than $2,000; $2,001 to $4,000; $4,001 to $6,000; or $6,001 to $8,000.

Fewer than a third of the doctors and nurses (32 percent) got the correct price range for the man treated for labored breathing, which cost $2,423. Forty percent correctly identified the price range for the child with the sore throat, which cost $596, and fewer than half (43 percent) chose the right price range for the woman treated for abdominal pain whose charge was $4,713.

“We continue to have poor understanding of the costs of routine care in the emergency department,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Kevin Hoffman, said in a Reuters report.

Medical decisions should never be made based solely on cost, said Hoffman, who is an emergency medicine resident at Lakeland Health in Saint Joseph, Mich. However, he  added, “when there is more than one way to effectively treat a patient, the more cost-efficient choice should be chosen.”

Have you ever been surprised by a high emergency room bill? Please complete Voices’ new survey.