Abstract

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) was enacted in 1986 in the United States to address "patient dumping," or refusing to provide emergency care to patients and instead transferring them to other hospitals. Under EMTALA, the "reverse-dumping" provision prevents hospitals from refusing patients who require specialized capabilities or facilities if the hospital has the capacity to treat them. Despite this provision, patients continue to be transferred to distant tertiary care centers.We reviewed the literature on EMTALA in the context of a critically ill woman with an infection associated with an orthopaedic implant who was rejected from 2 geographically closer tertiary care centers and was ultimately transferred by helicopter ambulance to an academic teaching hospital that was 169 miles away from her home.After transfer to our tertiary care, level-I trauma center, the patient spent 61 days in the intensive care unit; she required 9 operative procedures, which totaled 1,520 minutes of operative time. Eighteen medical specialties and 8 ancillary medical consulting teams were involved in her care. She underwent 1,436 laboratory and 83 radiographic studies. The total reimbursement from Medi-Cal (California's Medicaid program) for her care in our tertiary care center was $463,753; the hospital charges were more than tenfold higher.Dumping and reverse dumping continue despite compromise of patient care and the high financial burden of the accepting institutions. This may be due to ineffective monitoring and enforcement, lack of uniformity among the courts, and lack of incentive to receive uninsured or poorly funded patients. Under EMTALA, it is difficult for tertiary care centers to argue lack of specialized capabilities or capacity to accept patients, and neither hospitals nor physicians are compensated for the charges of providing care to uninsured or underinsured patients. Moving forward, efforts to better align financial incentives through cost-sharing between community hospitals and tertiary care centers, increased clinician literacy regarding the provisions of EMTALA, and increased transparency with hospital transfers may help improve EMTALA compliance and patient care.

View details for DOI 10.2106/JBJS.18.01166

View details for PubMedID 31220031