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The following is a summary of “Analyzing temporal patterns in frequent emergency department visits among oncology patients using semantic similarity measures,” published in the March 2025 issue of American Journal of Emergency Medicine by Kang et al.
Individuals with cancer often visit emergency department (ED) for acute symptoms and complications, yet frequent ED use in this group has received less attention than preventable visits.
Researchers conducted a retrospective study to examine the temporal visit patterns of individuals with cancer who frequently used the ED.
They analyzed ED visit records from 10 large hospitals (5 urban, 5 rural) in Illinois between 2018 and 2019. Adults with 4 or more visits in a year were identified as frequent ED users and categorized as cancer or non-cancer users based on cancer-related diagnoses in their initial 4 visits. The Wu-Palmer method was applied to measure semantic similarity between diagnoses.
The results showed that among 98,246 users were frequent in ED, 18.2% had at least 1 cancer-related visit. Individuals with cancer accounted for 21.7% of frequent users in urban ED and 7.6% in rural EDs. Proximity scores were slightly higher for those with cancer than for those without. Central nervous system malignancies had the highest median proximity score, while breast cancer had a lower score. In both urban and rural EDs, proximity scores were significantly higher for individuals with cancer, with a more pronounced difference in urban settings.
Investigators concluded that patients of oncology had frequent ED visits exhibited distinct patterns compared to patients without cancer.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675724006934
