2023

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UCSF-authored study shows racial disparities in heart attack treatments

“'Our hospitals basically act like economic entities,' said Dr. Renee Hsia, an emergency-medicine physician at UCSF and one of the study's authors. 'They will purposely locate themselves in areas that are best for profits, but it's not always the best outcome.'

'The biggest thing that surprised me is that the differences were so stark,' Hsia said. 'To actually find a decrease in your likelihood of death, that's a big deal.'"

— Covered in SF Examiner, Dec 15, 2023.

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Children were most likely group to visit the ER for mental health care during the pandemic

“'This points to resource shortages in both inpatient and outpatient mental health care,' said Renee Hsia. 'Patients may need longer-term specialized care, which sometimes requires weeks waiting for an open bed in another county.'

'Because of this, our patients' needs may be a reflection of unmet medical, social, and psychological conditions,' she said. 'In the case of this study, it is possible that mental health resources were unable to keep up with the well-documented increase in adolescent mental health crises during the pandemic, and patients sought help in the emergency room as a last resort.'"

— Covered in UC Berkeley Rausser College of Natural Resources, Oct 5, 2023.

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Increased use of EDs for mental health during COVID underscored systemic gaps in care: study

“Renee Y. Hsia, MD, told Fierce Healthcare in an email that the fact that non-mental health ED visits decreased more than mental health ED visits indicates that the 'demand for mental health emergencies was less elastic than other ED visits, meaning that there is a critical need for mental health services that need to be addressed.

'Our findings show that the pandemic unmasked this underlying need for mental healthcare since these mental health emergencies did not have alternative sources of care.'”

— Covered in Fierce Healthcare, Jul 11, 2023.

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Why are ER wait times getting longer? New UCSF study suggests a reason

“One main takeaway is that 'our health system, in particular our emergency care capacity, has not kept pace with the demand for emergency care,' said the study's head author Dr. Renee Hsia, a professor at UCSF's Department of Emergency Medicine and an emergency physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. 

''(They) have probably experienced a decline in our collective ability to respond to emergencies well because our system is strained. When you have crowded conditions and don't have enough resources, the quality of our patient care suffers. It's a sobering reality.'”

— Covered in SF Chronicle, Jun 22, 2023.

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Study: California is losing a emergency rooms and gaining more patients

“'The study was born out of a desire to really know whether or not the experiences that we have on the front line are backed up by evidence,' lead author Dr. Renee Hsia, a UCSF professor of emergency medicine and emergency room physician, told The Examiner. 

'It's a hard message to get, but I do think that there's more appetite for it, and people recognize that this is not a sustainable system,' said Hsia. 'It's actually getting worse. The system is straining and is at its breaking point.'"

— Covered in SF Examiner Jun 22, 2023.

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Why Wait Times in the Emergency Room Are So Long in California

"'We know that there is overcrowding in the ED,' said lead author Renee Y. Hsia, MD, a UCSF professor of emergency medicine. 'Capacity has largely failed to match the rise is patient demand.' 

'Our findings show what many health care workers already know to be true: the burden on emergency departments across the state of California has intensified over the last 10 to 15 years,' Hsia said.”

— Covered in UCSF, Jun 22, 2023.

Editorials 

Same ER, child, injury, and day. Different bills

"There are few certainties in life, but one of them is that we will all need healthcare at some point. And another, at least for those of us living in America, is that we have no idea what it will cost or why. This would never be tolerated in any other industry. 

What can we do about it?"

Published in Los Angeles Times, Dec 11, 2023.

How the NFL offers a window into health care solutions for our country

"We all agree that emergency care should be provided – now we need to focus on the how. In too many cases, the market is simply not equipped to determine what care costs and when and to whom it should be provided. The good news about market failure in health care is that we have a clear opportunity to improve how we deliver care.

It’s time to stop fumbling the ball and get it in the end zone.”

Published in KevinMD, Dec 3, 2023.

Let's leverage graduate medical education to increase Medicaid re-enrollment

"Residency determines what kid of physicians we have as a nation and where these physicians will practice. Tying graduate medical education to Medicaid would advance the how of medicine: access to physicians for all of us."

Published in STAT, Nov 2, 2023.

Improving Out-Of-Pocket Cost Transparency In The Emergency Department

"To ensure patients using the ED have equitable access to meaningful cost information and financial advocacy, a policy-driven cultural and technological shift is needed to support multidisciplinary teams in facilitating out-of-pocket cost integration at the point of care."

Published in Health Affairs Forefront, Oct 26, 2023.