Medicare Emergency Room Visits per 1,000 Beneficiaries (CMS)

Limitaciones

Original Medicare (fee-for-service) only: beneficiaries in Original Medicare Parts A and B, counted for each month entitled, not all enrollees. In 2024 those beneficiaries were 35% of Georgia's Medicare beneficiaries and 20-49% of each county's (Medicare Advantage up to 76%, Clayton County), so county figures can describe a fee-for-service minority. Rates count ER visits, not people, per 1,000 of those beneficiaries. Georgia's row is CMS's own figure, not a sum of its counties. Who is covered: CMS counts beneficiaries with Part A, Part B and Original Medicare for every month they were entitled (num_om_beneficiaries), new enrollees and people who died during the year included; anyone in Medicare Advantage at any point in the year, or with Part A or Part B alone, is left out. An ER visit is a hospital emergency room visit whether the person went home or was admitted (CMS counts inpatient and outpatient ER visits); each repeat visit by the same person counts. The same visit can also appear in medicare_service_utilization, as a hospital outpatient visit (if the person went home) and as the ER doctor's evaluation and management event: never add ER visits to those. Georgia's rate fell 20% from 2019 to 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (687 to 551 per 1,000), and was still below its 2019 level in 2024 (564). Trends also reflect who stays in Original Medicare: beneficiaries under 65 (entitled by disability or end-stage renal disease), whose rate is higher (862 vs 533 per 1,000 at 65 and over in 2024; higher in every year), fell from 20% to 9% of Georgia's Original Medicare beneficiaries between 2014 and 2024, which by itself pulls the all-ages rate down. CMS suppresses figures built on fewer than 11 beneficiaries or service users ('*'); they are NULL here and never filled in from other figures. No served figure is suppressed in this release. CMS's GA-UNKNOWN row (13000), beneficiaries placed in no county, is fully suppressed and left out. Georgia's row is CMS's own figure, not a sum of the county rows: it also counts the handful of beneficiaries CMS places in no county (GA-UNKNOWN), so the 159 counties need not add up to it exactly. age_bracket 'under_65' (beneficiaries entitled by disability or end-stage renal disease) and '65_plus' exist for Georgia only; county rows are 'all'. The two brackets' visits and beneficiaries add up to 'all' exactly. CMS also publishes the share of beneficiaries with at least one ER visit; it counts people, not visits, and is not in this table. From CMS's 2014-2024 release (file updated 2026-04-29); each release restates earlier years, so the figures here are replaced when the data is refreshed. tract_geoid is always NULL.