Evaluating Pediatric Emergency Care Within Epic Cosmos

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OBJECTIVES: To describe the characteristics and selected quality improvement (QI) measures of pediatric emergency department (ED) encounters within Epic Cosmos. METHODS: We performed a retrospective study within Cosmos of all pediatric (<18 years) US-based ED encounters between January 1, 2020, and June 30, 2025. We summarized demographics, visit characteristics, and diagnoses. We evaluated QI metrics for key conditions. RESULTS: We included 41,735,030 ED encounters from 18,757,872 distinct patients. The median encounter age was 6 years (IQR 2 to 12) and 52.0% were male. Most patients were White (58.7%), non-Hispanic (67.4%), publicly insured (58.5%), urban-dwelling (85.7%), and nearly half resided in the South (47.6%). The most common chief complaints were fever (16.6%), cough (11.7%), vomiting (8.2%), and abdominal pain (7.4%). Most patients were triaged as Emergency Severity Index (ESI) 4 (45.4%) or ESI 3 (35.7%), and 88.3% were discharged from the ED. QI metric analysis demonstrated corticosteroid use for asthma in 86.3% of encounters, chest radiography among children with asthma in 42.8%, brain CT for head injury in 18.6%, antibiotic use for viral illness in 4.8%, corticosteroid use for croup in 91.7%, intravenous fluid use for dehydration in 10.7%, and topical anesthesia use for lacerations in 56.4%. CONCLUSIONS: We characterized pediatric ED encounters within the Epic Cosmos platform, which is consistent with national patterns of pediatric ED care. These findings highlight the utility of Cosmos for assessing care quality and variability in pediatric emergency medicine, although findings should be interpreted cautiously given variability in coding, data mapping, and institutional representation.

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