Office Visits Preventing Emergency Room Visits: Evidence From the Flint Water Switch

Emergency department visits are costly to providers and to patients. We use the Flint water crisis to test if an increase in office visits reduced avoidable emergency room visits. In September 2015, the city of Flint issued a lead advisory to its residents, alerting them of increased lead levels in their drinking water, resulting from the switch in water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Using Medicaid claims for 2013-2016, we find that this information shock increased the share of enrollees who had lead tests performed by 1.7 percentage points. Additionally, it increased office visits immediately following the information shock and led to a reduction of 4.9 preventable, non-emergent, and primary-care-treatable emergency room visits per 1000 eligible children (8.2%). This decrease is present in shifts from emergency room visits to office visits across several common conditions. Our analysis suggest that children were more likely to receive care from the same clinic following lead tests and that establishing care reduced the likelihood parents would take their children to emergency rooms for conditions treatable in an office setting. Our results are potentially applicable to any situation in which individuals are induced to seek more care in an office visit setting.