The epidemiology of osteopathic diagnoses and treatments in United States emergency departments from 2018 to 2021.

CONTEXT

Although a large proportion of US emergency physicians are osteopathic physicians (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine [DOs]), the frequency of osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM) use in emergency departments (EDs) is unknown.

OBJECTIVES

We aimed to estimate the frequency of OMM in EDs across the US and describe the cohort who received OMM.

METHODS

We performed a retrospective cohort study of ED patients from 2018 to 2021 in the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS), Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Encounters with OMM were identified by diagnosis and procedure codes. We calculated weighted frequencies of encounters with OMM per 100,000 ED encounters with 95 % confidence intervals (CIs) by year, accounting for the complex survey design of NEDS.

RESULTS

We identified 9,576 encounters with OMM during the study period. The weighted frequency of encounters with OMM per 100,000 ED encounters was 6.9 (95 % CI, 3.8 to 11.5) for 2018, 8.6 (4.3-15.5) for 2019, 12.6 (3.5-32.0) for 2020, and 5.5 (3.3-8.5) for 2021. Most patients were female (5,669, 59.2 %) with a median age of 53 (interquartile range [IQR] 36 to 67). The majority were from metropolitan teaching hospitals (7,094, 74.1 %), and about half were admitted (4,565, 47.7 %). The most common osteopathic diagnosis code was segmental and somatic dysfunction of the thoracic region (4,202 of 21,358 [19.7 %] codes).

CONCLUSIONS

OMM is infrequently provided across hospital-owned US EDs. Further research is needed to describe the frequency of OMM across all acute care settings.