Michael Johnson is 57. He’s from Dallas. He’s diabetic. He has a job in fast food. He rents a home. He gets by.
Until recently, no one ever explained to him how hospitals, doctors and emergency rooms work.
“My momma always told me when something’s wrong with you, go see the doctor,” Johnson said.
The only way he knew to see a doctor was go to the emergency room at Parkland Hospital, which is why he racked up 31 ER visits in 24 months.
Johnson’s numbers are not at all surprising for administrators at Parkland, which has one of the busiest emergency rooms in the country.
“It’s not unusual for us to see in excess of 700 people in a 24-hour period in our emergency room,” said Dr. Esmail Porsa, executive vice president and chief strategy and integration officer for Parkland Health and Hospital System.
Parkland’s ER is busy for countless reasons, but chief among them is repeat patients like Johnson. He’s considered a high emergency department utilizer because of those repeated visits.
High ER utilizers often take up valuable space which can lead to long waits, Porsa said. Because Parkland is a public hospital, these frequent patients cost Dallas County taxpayers money.
The hospital wanted to determine why these high utilizers keep coming in. But to do that, they needed to identify who they are.
“We looked at the data every which way. We looked at zip codes, gender, race, education, income. One day we sorted the data by medical record and realized — lo and behold — there were three patients on the top of the list,” Porsa said.
Those three patients visited the hospital 500 times in one year.
"Five hundred times," Porsa repeated.