Standardized Emergency Department Encounter Ratio (SEDR) for Dialysis Facilities

The Standardized Emergency Department Encounter Ratio is defined to be the ratio of the observed number of emergency department (ED) encounters that occur for adult Medicare ESRD dialysis patients treated at a particular facility to the number of encounters that would be expected given the characteristics of the dialysis facility’s patients and the national norm for dialysis facilities. Note that in this document an “emergency department encounter” always refers to an outpatient encounter that does not end in a hospital admission. This measure is calculated as a ratio but can also be expressed as a rate.

When used for public reporting, the measure calculation will be restricted to facilities with greater than 5 patient years at risk in the reporting year. This restriction is required to ensure patients cannot be identified due to small cell size.