In order to identify sunburn visits among commercially insured patients from January 2009 to December 2018, according to research published online August 11 in JAMA Dermatology , healthcare encounters for the diagnosis of sunburn are rare. common but not negligible .
Malgorzata K. Nowakowska, of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and his colleagues used data from Truven MarketScan to identify 186,168 patients with 208,777 encounters diagnosed with sunburn (0.15 percent of patients).
Most did not include medical treatment
The vast majority of patients had only one encounter with a diagnosis of sunburn (91.6 percent). The diagnosis of sunburn was more common among women and younger patients, and a fifth of encounters occurred in the emergency or urgent care setting.
Of the outpatient visits, dermatologists (26.0 percent) and family medicine physicians (22.0) handled the majority of encounters. Most of the encounters did not appear to include medical treatment for sunburn. As the researchers explain:
Our results suggest that administrative data can be used to expand our ability to study sunburn beyond self-reported surveys and can represent a resource for public health initiatives in the prevention and detection of skin cancer.