Emergency Department Use Among Adults Receiving Dialysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Importance: People with kidney failure receiving maintenance dialysis visit the emergency department (ED) 3 times per year on average, which is 3- to 8-fold more often than the general population. Little is known about the factors that contribute to potentially preventable ED use in this population. Objective: To identify the clinical and sociodemographic factors associated with potentially preventable ED use among patients receiving maintenance dialysis. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study used linked administrative health data within the Alberta Kidney Disease Network to identify adults aged 18 years or older receiving maintenance dialysis (ie, hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis) between April 1, 2010, and March 31, 2019. Patients who had been receiving dialysis for more than 90 days were followed up from cohort entry (defined as dialysis start date plus 90 days) until death, outmigration from the province, receipt of a kidney transplant, or end of study follow-up. The Andersen behavioral model of health services was used as a conceptual framework to identify variables related to health care need, predisposing factors, and enabling factors. Data were analyzed in March 2024. Main Outcomes and Measures: Rates of all-cause ED encounters and potentially preventable ED use associated with 4 kidney disease-specific ambulatory care-sensitive conditions (hyperkalemia, heart failure, volume overload, and malignant hypertension) were calculated. Multivariable negative binomial regression models were used to examine the association between clinical and sociodemographic factors and rates of potentially preventable ED use. Results: The cohort included 4925 adults (mean [SD] age, 60.8 [15.5] years; 3071 males [62.4%]) with kidney failure receiving maintenance hemodialysis (3183 patients) or peritoneal dialysis (1742 patients) who were followed up for a mean (SD) of 2.5 (2.0) years. In all, 3877 patients had 34 029 all-cause ED encounters (3100 [95% CI, 2996-3206] encounters per 1000 person-years). Of these, 755 patients (19.5%) had 1351 potentially preventable ED encounters (114 [95% CI, 105-124] encounters per 1000 person-years). Compared with patients with a nonpreventable ED encounter, patients with a potentially preventable ED encounter were more likely to be in the lowest income quintile (38.8% vs 30.9%; P < .001); to experience heart failure (46.8% vs 39.9%; P = .001), depression (36.6% vs 32.5%; P = .03), and chronic pain (60.1% vs 54.9%; P = .01); and to have a longer duration of dialysis (3.6 vs 2.6 years; P < .001). In multivariable regression analyses, potentially preventable ED use was higher for younger adults (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 1.69 [95% CI, 1.33-2.15] for those aged 18 to 44 years) and patients with chronic pain (IRR, 1.35 [95% CI, 1.14-1.61]), greater material deprivation (IRR, 1.57 [95% CI, 1.16-2.12]), a history of hyperkalemia (IRR, 1.31 [95% CI, 1.09-1.58]), and historically high ED use (ie, ≥3 ED encounters in the prior year; IRR, 1.46 [95% CI, 1.23-1.73). Conclusions and Relevance: In this study of adults receiving maintenance dialysis in Alberta, Canada, among those with ED use, 1 in 5 had a potentially preventable ED encounter; reasons for such encounters were associated with both psychosocial and medical factors. The findings underscore the need for strategies that address social determinants of health to avert potentially preventable ED use in this 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".