The leading cause of ED visits in the study was the cancer itself, although many visits were unrelated to non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) or cancer therapy.
Less than 10% of ED visits were related to cancer therapy, but visits were much more common among patients receiving chemotherapy than among those receiving immunotherapy or tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs).
Manan P. Shah, MD, and Joel W. Neal, MD, PhD, both of Stanford (Calif. ) University, reported these results in JCO Oncology Practice.
The authors noted that, in the United States, care of patients with cancer, among all diseases, leads to the highest per-person cost. Unplanned hospital visits are among the largest drivers of increased spending in advanced cancer care, accounting for 48% of spending. However, that spending may not be indicative of better quality care, but rather of inefficiency, according to the authors.
One registry spanning 2009-2012 and including more than 400,000 newly diagnosed cancer patients found lung cancer to have the third-highest rate of unplanned hospitalizations (after hepatobiliary and pancreatic cancer). Those findings were published in JCO Oncology Practice in 2018.
While the reason for presentation to the ED is often the cancer or its therapy in this population, there is a paucity of research on the relative contribution of factors leading to unplanned hospital visits.
Common precipitants of medical emergencies in advanced stages of lung cancer include pulmonary embolism, obstructive pneumonia, spinal cord compression caused by metastasis, and tumor progression or pleural effusion leading to respiratory failure.
Lung cancer therapies, such as TKIs, immunotherapy, and cytotoxic chemotherapy, can also cause various medical emergencies arising out of skin reactions, gastrointestinal dysfunction, organ inflammatory processes, and bone marrow suppression.
Identifying drivers of unplanned ED visits
The primary goals of Dr. Shah and Dr. Neal’s study were to understand the drivers of unplanned ED visits and identify potential strategies to prevent them.
Drawing from the Stanford Medicine Research Data Repository, the authors identified 97 NSCLC patients with 173 ED visits at Stanford.
Patients were sorted according to which of the three therapies they had been receiving in the 3 months prior to the unplanned visit – TKIs (n = 47), immunotherapy (n = 24), or chemotherapy (n = 26). Patients receiving a combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy were classified under the immunotherapy category.
ED visits were divided into four categories: cancer related, therapy related, unrelated to cancer or therapy, and rule-out (when an outpatient provider sent the patient to rule out medico-oncologic emergencies such as pulmonary embolism or cord compression).
If the patient’s main complaint(s) began 2 or more days before presentation, the diagnostics or therapeutics could have been provided in an outpatient setting (e.g., in clinic or urgent care), and the patient was discharged directly from the ED, the encounter was classified as potentially preventable. Among these preventable encounters, those made during business hours were also labeled unnecessary because they could have been managed through the Stanford sick call system for same-day urgent visits.