Health care utilization of resettled hurricane Katrina victims displaced to a neighboring city

Objective: Provide descriptive healthcare utilization data for a population resettled from a natural disaster area to a large metropolitan city.

Methods: Resettled Katrina victims (KV) identified from EMS run calls from 8/04-8/05 were cross referenced with EMRs of hospitals within the Houston city. Descriptive data from a subset of this population is arranged by demographics, health data, and utilization data.

Results: The KV data contained 865 unique visits from 352 patients, 562/865 (65%) women, 87.6% African-American, 16% were uninsured, and 69.4% had (medicare/-aid). 52.5% visits required EMS services, 29.9% were hospitalized, and 5.9% required the ICU. The majority of KV were ages 21-40 (154/352, 53.8%), female (68.1%), required EMS (46.2%), and seen for < 24 hours (59.7%), or admitted (23.7%). This subgroup represented 45.3% of the total cohort and 43.8% of the total visits; 322 (77.2%) had insurance, and 22.8% were uninsured. In contrast, the Elderly KV (>65 yrs, 79/352) were 73% female, 93.5% insured. The elderly cohort required more EMS services (57.6%), admissions (59.1%), ICU care (12.1%); had inpatient stays > 2 days (35%), or > 7 days (17.7%). The elderly KV represented 12.8% (45) of the cohort but utilized 15.3% of the KV cohort's visits. The younger cohort (n=154) required 14,072 hrs of health related care versus 15,583 hrs for the 45 elderly KV cohort.

Conclusions: The elderly required more overall health system resources but were better insured, suggesting that the elderly should be recognized as a leading recipient of health care resources of disaster victims.