THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC
Opioid crisis now burdens hospitals
ER treatment soars 99%, inpatient care rises 64%, feds say.
By Joel Achenbach and Dan Keating Washington Post
A young man in Delray Beach, Fla., recovers in February after being revived from a heroin overdose. Emergency room treatment and inpatient care for opioid-related issues skyrocketed in the period from 2005 to 2014. SCOTT MCINTYRE / THE NEW YORK TIMES
The coast-to-coast opioid epidemic is swamping hospitals, with government data published Tuesday showing 1.27 million emergency room visits or inpatient stays for opioid-related issues in a single year.
The 2014 numbers, the latest available for every state and the District of Columbia, reflect a 64 percent increase for inpatient care and a 99 percent jump for emergency room treatment compared to figures from 2005. Their trajectory likely will keep climbing if the epidemic continues unabated.
The report, released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, puts Maryland at the very top of the national list for inpatient care. The state, already struggling with overdoses from heroin and prescription opioids, has seen the spread of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which can be mixed with heroin or cocaine and is extraordinarily powerful.Gov. Larry Hogan this year declared a state of emergency in response to the crisis.
Trailing Maryland for opioid-related hospitalizations is Massachusetts, followed by the District of Columbia. The AHRQ report does not speculate on why some states have such high rates of hospital admissions. It suggests that people in the most urban places are more likely to be treated in a hospital than those in rural areas — which would indicate that lack of access to medical care is a factor in the uptick in death rates seen in less-urban parts of the country.
“Our data tell us what is going on. They tell us what the facts are. But they don’t give us the underlying reasons for what we’re seeing here,” said report co-author Anne Elixhauser, a senior research scientist at AHRQ.
The sharpest increase in hospitalization and emergency room treatment for opioids was among people ages 25 to 44, and that women are now as likely as men to be admitted to a hospital for inpatient treatment for opioid-related problems. In 2005, there was a significant gap between men and women, with men more likely to be admitted. That gap closed entirely by 2014.
The 10 states with the highest rate of opioid-related hospital admissions in 2014 were, in addition to Maryland and Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, West Virginia, Connecticut, Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Maine.
The 10 states with the lowest rate of inpatient stays that year were: Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Texas, Kansas, Georgia, South Dakota, Arkansas, South Carolina and Hawaii.