New estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that emergency room visits rose nearly 10% to 136 million in 2009. The preliminary data were released Tuesday at the meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians in San Francisco. A statement from the organization linked the rise in emergency room visits to physicians' fear of lawsuits, citing two studies also presented Tuesday at the meeting. The first, a survey-based study by researchers at Stony Brook University Medical Center in Stony Brook, N.Y., and at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and at Columbia University in New York City, found that in 27% of cases, emergency room physicians who admitted patients with chest pain said that they would not have thought it necessary to stay overnight in the hospital if they had been the patients themselves.
