Characterizing the Long-term Care and Community-dwelling Elderly Patients' Use of the Emergency Department
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Elderly patients, particularly those in long-term care (LTC), are a growing proportion of patients who present to the emergency department (ED). This population is medically complex, with high burdens on ED resources and patient flow. This study sought to characterize how elderly LTC and community-dwelling (CD) patients use ED services. Materials and methods This was a retrospective cohort study that assessed approximately 200 senior (age>65) ED visits. These patients were either residing in LTC facilities or they were CD. All participants lived in the same, medium-sized Canadian city. Data indicating demographic information, acuity of presentation, and administrative parameters (such as disposition status or length of stay) were collected and analyzed. Results A few statistically significant differences between the populations were noted. This included mean age, which was 82.6 years in the LTC population and 77.3 for the CD group (p<0.001). There were 27 repeat visits among patients in the LTC group, compared to six from the CD patients (p<0.001). In the LTC population, 75 patients required transport from emergency medical services (EMS) compared to 41 from the control group (p<0.001). Conclusion LTC patients re-present to the ED and use EMS services more frequently than their CD counterparts. This difference indicates potential areas to target for future quality improvement work to help enhance care to this vulnerable population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".