{"id":976,"date":"2026-06-04T10:30:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T10:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/california-relocation-journal.com\/?p=976"},"modified":"2026-06-04T10:30:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T10:30:16","slug":"emergency-room-visits-during-heat-waves-available-to-the-public-in-near-real-time-in-l-a-county","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/california-relocation-journal.com\/?p=976","title":{"rendered":"Emergency room visits during heat waves available to the public in \u2018near-real time\u2019 in L.A. County"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

For the first time, Los Angeles County residents can see how many people are ending up in emergency rooms, their bodies pushed past the limit, during heat waves. <\/p>\n

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The county Department of Public Health says its new Heat-Related Illness and Mortality Dashboard will provide heat illness counts in \u201cnear real time,\u201d which means weekly. That might seem like a lag, but until now the data were only provided upon request and in ad hoc reports.<\/p>\n

Heat is the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States and heat waves are only getting more frequent and intense as the climate changes.<\/p>\n

Public health experts called the tracker a meaningful step toward assessing how well county programs are addressing heat risks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s showing the county\u2019s commitment to reducing the burden of heat on people\u2019s health,\u201d said David Eisenman, director of UCLA\u2019s Center for Public Health and Disasters. \u201cAs the county puts more resources into that, this is a metric that allows the public to judge the effectiveness of the work.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a handful of other places that also do this, but they\u2019re all relatively new,\u201d said Bharat Venkat, director of the UCLA Heat Lab, noting as examples Imperial and Riverside counties in California, Harris County in Texas and Maricopa County in Arizona. \u201cIt is very much welcome.\u201d <\/p>\n

The tracker takes heat illness data from patient complaints and doctor diagnoses provided by a countywide monitoring project that was previously available only to public health officials. The website says that what it provides is an undercount. The records often fail to count people when heat exacerbates more obvious health problems. <\/p>\n

\u201cHeat piggybacks off of preexisting health conditions,\u201d Venkat said. \u201cSay you go to the ER and you\u2019re experiencing an intense psychotic episode, or a heart attack or a stroke. It\u2019s very likely that the doctor is going to diagnose that as a psychotic episode, heart attack or stroke, and less likely that they\u2019ll note that heat is contributing to that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Heat-related deaths are counted from death certificates, which present similar issues for undercounting. Those numbers will be reported monthly on the dashboard.<\/p>\n

L.A. County has a recently approved heat action plan that aims to educate the public and reduce indoor and outdoor temperatures with strategies such as opting for shade and air conditioning.<\/p>\n

The new tracker breaks down daily heat-related emergency room visits and deaths by age group, geography, and race and ethnicity. <\/p>\n

It shows that people over 65 are more vulnerable to heat illness. For Black residents, heat is disproportionately fatal. And people in the San Fernando, San Gabriel, and Antelope valleys see the most heat-related emergency room visits. <\/p>\n

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Kelly Turner, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, stressed that heat sickness tracks closely with social inequality and is preventable.<\/p>\n

\u201cA heat death or heat illness is dependent on who you are and what assets you have,\u201d Turner said. \u201cIf you have air conditioning or not, if you work outside or you don\u2019t, all of those factors factor in.\u201d <\/p>\n

She noted that there is more risk in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys because of the combination of hotter days and more people who are unprotected. \u201cWhen you map those two things on top of each other, you get a hot spot of vulnerability,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

California already has a tool called CalHeatScore that uses historical hospital records and temperatures to forecast risk for different ZIP Codes in the state during heat events. <\/p>\n

Public health officials hope to use the new dashboard to target messaging and public outreach when extreme heat strikes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we\u2019re having an extended heat event we can show that, \u2018Hey, we\u2019re having heat impacts\u2019 as they\u2019re happening,\u201d said Dr. Nicole Quick, chief science officer at the L.A. County Department of Public Health. <\/p>\n

Venkat said he would like to see the tool become more robust, in line with Maricopa County\u2019s dashboard, widely viewed as the current gold standard for heat illness and mortality tracking. He said the Arizona county, which includes Phoenix, dives deeper into health records and conditions surrounding hospitalizations and deaths to better reflect the role of heat. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey do scene investigations and send someone out to take notes about where the body was found,\u201d Venkat said. \u201cWhat was going on? Did they have air conditioning? Were they outside? Did they have access to water? What medications were they taking? All those things provide important context.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eisenman said he would like to see the county train physicians on recording heat-related illness, as it has been \u201cclear for a long time\u201d that doctors don\u2019t make the diagnosis enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have to be more than just a handout or a few slides. You\u2019d really have to have each institution make some effort to change physicians\u2019 behaviors,\u201d Eisenman said. He added that it probably hasn\u2019t been done because of the costs involved.<\/p>\n

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A new dashboard makes public for the first time heat-related deaths and emergency room visits in near-real time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":975,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate"],"yoast_head":"\nEmergency room visits during heat waves available to the public in \u2018near-real time\u2019 in L.A. 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