Far fewer hospital emergency room visits are for medical problems better addressed in other settings, according to a new study.

In a review of six years worth of data encompassing 424 million ER visits, researchers found that only 3.3 percent of those visits were truly “avoidable,” with the avoidable visits mostly involving problems ERs are not equipped to address, such as dental and mental health issues.

This finding flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that people turn too quickly to hospital ERs for routine medical problems or use ERs because they lack access to more appropriate care.

Learn more about the study and its findings in this Fierce Healthcare article or go here for a link to the study “Avoidable emergency department visits: a starting point,” which was published in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care.