A
congressional advisory board report released Friday, October 5th, found
that many emergency room visits by seniors could be avoided. The study,
reported by Kaiser Health News, found that nearly 60 percent of Medicare beneficiary visits to emergency rooms,
and 25 percent of their hospital admissions, were “potentially preventable,”
had patients received better care at home or in outpatient settings.
Hospitals spent $30.8 billion on 4.4
million hospital admissions in 2006 that might have been avoidable, according
to a report by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Data like this is why researchers
have been looking at reducing preventable ER visits and hospital admissions for
years. This study is one of the first large analyses of Medicare patients. The
study analyzed health services provided to 5 percent of all traditional
Medicare program beneficiaries from 2006 to 2008.
“These are spectacular rates,” said
Scott Armstrong, a member of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and CEO
of Group Health Cooperative, a Seattle-based health plan.
The potentially preventable admissions or ER
visits do not indicate the hospital acted inappropriately. Instead, they are a
measure of a community’s outpatient care system that includes private physician
offices, community health centers and urgent care centers, study co-author
Nancy Ray, a MedPAC principal policy analyst, told the congressional advisory
board. Ray said not every preventable ER visit or admission can be avoided. The
study showed wide variation of these rates across the country and within
cities.
Patients could
avoid preventable ER visits by having health conditions
treated by family doctors or urgent care centers or by making sure to take
all their medicine. Hospital admissions could be prevented if conditions
such as asthma, diabetes or heart failure were better monitored by patients and
their doctors, commission staff said.
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