The New Yorker magazine did a big feature article on Scott Zeller, MD ’82 life’s work and his invention, the EmPATH unit (Emergency Psychiatry Assessment, Treatment and Healing unit).

These are new ERs in hospitals specifically designed for people experiencing behavioral health emergencies, who in the status quo are stacked in hallways for long hours waiting for an elusive psychiatric hospital bed to open up, and instead, EmPATH units have resulted in the following improvements in care and metrics published in the top peer-reviewed academic journal Academic Emergency Medicine:

*Reduced Emergency Department (ED) behavioral health patient length of stay from an average of 16.2 hours to just 4.9 hours (70% reduction!)
*Reduced inpatient psychiatric admissions from 57% of patients to just 27% of patients (53% improvement)
*Reduced 30-day psych patient return to ED (recidivism) by 25%
*Improved the outpatient follow-up of patients from 39.4% to 63.2% (60% improvement)
*For those patients that still needed inpatient admission after EmPATH, their inpatient Length of Stay days were decreased.
*Added $861,000 to the emergency department bottom line in the first year alone by moving patients to better, more prompt care in EmPATH, thus opening up ER beds for other patients

EmPATH units are also far safer than traditional ERs for even the highest acuity patients, and avoid coercive care in over 99% of patients, while greatly reducing delays and costs.

There’s now several dozen EmPATH units operating across the US, with scores more in development around the US and across the world, including in Singapore, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Scotland and South Africa.

You can read more about this amazing work here. Congratulations Scott!