Connecticut residents rack up $1 billion in hospital bills annually that could possibly be avoided, a report shows, with Fairfield County in the middle of the pack in preventable hospitalizations.
Statewide in 2006, 48,000 hospital visits could possibly have been prevented, according to data published this spring by the Connecticut Office of Health Care Access (OHCA). That was up 4 percent from 2000.
With a 55 percent surge in preventable hospitalizations, Greenwich Hospital led the state followed by its sister institution Yale-New Haven Hospital at 47 percent. Stamford Hospital had a 13 percent drop in such cases.
Between 2000 and 2006, total charges increased from $600 million to more than $1 billion, despite a decline in the length of time patients are spending at hospitals, which OHCA attributed to hospitals becoming more proficient at treating many of the conditions.
The Hartford-based organization uses the term “preventable” to describe conditions that regular doctor”™s visits have demonstrated effectiveness in treating, whether chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes, or acute episodes of illnesses like bacterial pneumonia.
“Although preventable hospitalizations are instances of inpatient care, they provide insight into the quality of the health care system outside of the hospital because timely primary care generally ”˜prevents”™ most people with these conditions from becoming so severely ill that they require hospital care,” OHCA wrote in its report. “Preventable hospitalizations provide a valid starting point for assessing the quality of primary health care services in the community.”
While some 12 percent of hospitalizations fit the bill, according to OHCA, Connecticut”™s preventable hospitalization rate is 40 percent below that of the U.S. rate on a per capita basis.
The lone ailments for which Connecticut exceeded the national rate ”“ only slightly ”“ were bacterial pneumonia, dehydration and newborns with low birth weights.
The latter condition costs more than $70,000 per episode to treat on average, making it far and away the most expensive condition on OHCA”™s catalog of costs.
Preventable hospitalization pushes up the cost of health care in several ways, according to OHCA. Some 83 percent of patients are admitted through the emergency room, which has higher operating costs then other health departments, and a significant number were admitted on multiple occasions for the same ailment.
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Between 2000 and 2006, the fastest growing segment of the population undergoing preventable hospitalizations were Hispanics, whose numbers surged 43 percent; followed by Medicaid enrollees at 40 percent and children at 21 percent.
Uninsured patients were responsible for just $16 million of the total $1 billion in bills generated by such visits. Still, a 2000 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services determined the likelihood of preventable hospitalization increases “dramatically” as median community income decreases, with the poorest residents having the highest rates of admission for every measured category of hospitalization. In a study earlier this year, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that patients enrolled in HMOs were far less likely to be hospitalized for a preventable condition than those in fee-for-service health plans.
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