AUA 2018: Emergency Room Utilization and Associated Costs for Pediatric vs. Adult Nephrolithiasis

San Francisco, CA USA (UroToday.com) Diana K. Bowen, MD, a Pediatric Urology Fellow from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, presented data that compared the frequency of visits and associated charges for emergency room encounters during a single stones episode between pediatric and adult patients.

For this comparison, adults and children (≤18 y.o.) Medical Encounter Data in South Carolina from 1996-2014 were utilized, which provided a longitudinal patient-level data for all encounters. Dr. Bowen more specifically explained this use for the health utilization of ED encounters and comparing between pediatric and adult patients. They defined a stone episode as a 6 month period following the initial stone presentation. They were able to separately identify each encounter within that stone episode.

What they found from a total of 284,515 stone episodes, there was a higher portion of female gender in the pediatric patient. Pediatric patients had a higher proportion of ED encounters than adults, which rose faster over time. Charges for imaging, emergency, and surgical care for nephrolithiasis have all increased dramatically across both pediatric and adult patients. Finally, in looking at hospital variation, patients treated at a pediatric hospital had higher cost.

Presented by: Diana K. Bowen, MD

Written by: Kaelyn See, Department of Urology, University of California-Irvine at the 2018 AUA Annual Meeting - May 18 - 21, 2018 – San Francisco, CA USA