Letters: Non-emergency rooms
Re “Insurance raised use of hospital ERs, study says,†Jan. 5
One logical conclusion is that hospitals need to create a more cost-effective way to handle non-emergency patients.
Hospitals would be smart to establish a parallel non-emergency, primary-care clinic adjacent to their current ERs. They could be staffed with less-expensive care deliverers such as nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, respiratory therapists and pharmacists, still under the license of the hospital but without tying up the more expensive resources of a traditional ER.
If hospitals do not fill this void, some other smart business will. So why not just improve the hospitals’ delivery model?
Kay Brown
Laguna Hills
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