A new study examining emergency department patients finds that those with unmet addiction treatment needs incur higher hospital and emergency department charges than other patients, Medical News Today reported on December 21.

According to the study, “Unmet Substance Abuse Treatment Need, Health Services Utilization, and Cost: A Population-Based Emergency Department Study,” ER patients with unmet treatment needs are 81 percent more likely to be admitted during their emergency visit, and 46 percent more likely to have reported making at least one emergency department visit in the previous 12 months.

The study, led by Ian Rockett, PhD, from the West Virginia University Department of Community Medicine and Center for Rural Emergency Medicine, focused on emergency room patients in Tennessee, where less than 10 percent of patients needing addiction treatment were currently receiving it.

According to the research, Tennessee patients with unmet treatment needs who received emergency medical services accounted for $777.2 million in extra hospital charges for the state in 2000, which translates to an additional $1,568 for each emergency patient with an addiction problem that wasn’t addressed.

“We predict that systematically addressing substance abuse problems in emergency departments would produce major savings in time, resources, and costs,” Rockett said. “In exacerbating the workloads of very busy hospital staff, emergency patients with unmet substance abuse treatment need add many millions of dollars to annual healthcare costs. Our research finding speak to the importance of identifying them as substance abusers – either for a brief intervention or to refer them to substance abuse treatment as appropriate. The emergency department visit itself can represent a teachable moment for a patient.”

The study’s findings are published in the online edition of Annals of Emergency Medicine.