ed visits

Consumers are responding to the advent of higher-deductible plans and higher co-pays as you might expect. According to a new study by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, patients who bear a higher percentage of the cost of health services are choosing lower-cost options for their care, such as substituting generics for branded prescription drugs or primary care visits for specialist visits. In particular, the study noted, consumers seemed to be happy to switch medications to save money, …

A new study suggests that if pharmacists supervise their care, heart-failure patients tend to take their medication, spend less time in the hospital and generate fewer medical expenses. The study, lead by an investigator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Pharmacy, looked at 314 low-income patients with heart failure. During the study, half of these patients received standard pharmacy services, but the other half received care from a specially-trained pharmacist …

New research funded by pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts has concluded that consumers give up medications rather than switch from brand-name drugs to generics. The study, which looked at healthcare claims for two national employers, compared prescription claims for the first nine months of 2005 versus the first nine months of 2006. The employers had kicked off CDHPs for their employees in January 2006, with one of the two employers seeing more than 20 percent of employees enroll. …

Concerned about the cost of providing care for indigent patients, group of eight North Carolina clinics, health systems and county agencies have set up a collective designed to streamline care for the uninsured. The CapitalCare Collaborative is working to make sure patients use less expensive nonprofit and county agencies for routine care rather than visiting the region's emergency departments. To help members coordinate such care, the group will share uninsured patients' financial and …

An consumer health advocacy group has concluded that despite having insurance, many Americans face medical costs they cannot afford. A new report by The Access Project suggests that deductibles and co-payments, as well as premiums, are a major source of medical debt for many consumers. Other contributors to medical debt included annual or lifetime benefit caps, out-of-network charges and patient confusion over what they owe. The report's overall conclusions square with another recent …

Despite some pushback from critics, acceptance of consumer-directed health plans is growing in corporate circles. According to a new study by Watson Wyatt Worldwide and the National Business Group on Health, which surveyed 573 large U.S. companies, employer roll-outs of CDHPs climbed 5 percent last year, from 33 percent to 38 percent. Interestingly, only some of these employers (26 percent) offer or plan to offer a health savings account, a cornerstone of the model behind the CDHP. This …

A new study performed by Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care suggests that consumers with high-deductible health plans visit hospital emergency departments less often than patients with traditional health plan designs. The study, which compared 60,000 members of a traditional Massachusetts plan with 8,700 members of a high-deductible plan, found that there was only a slight difference between the groups for first-time emergency room visits. Members of the …

Street drugs have always been a factor in a subset of ED visits. But of late, it's becoming increasingly common for prescription and over-the-counter drugs to prompt ED visits as well. According to a new study released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, ED visits due to abuse or misuse of drugs shot up a remarkable 21 percent from 2004 to 2005. Emergency departments saw 613,053 cocaine and heroin overdoses, compared with 598,542 visits for pharma drug …

So, HIMSS is already beginning to slow down, even though the show doesn't officially end until tomorrow. (It could be that people are exhausted after walking the exhibit hall floor--we're talking a brightly colored, …

According to this activist group, it's an open-and-shut case: illegal immigrants are substantially increasing the volume of uncompensated costs hospitals must bear each year. The vast majority of the costs come from immigrants' use of the emergency department, especially for births, according to the Washington, DC-based Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Emergency care costs for immigrants have hit $1.4 billion per year in California, $700 million in New York, and more …