CYA. You know what it means. The problem is that concept does nothing to make us healthier.

Drs. Y. Tsugawa, A.K. Jha, J.P. Newhouse, A.M. Zaslavsky, and A.B. Jena of Harvard (among other affiliations) published results of their study about these medical practices in JAMA Internal Medicine. (Actually, this is a pre-publication. )

These researchers examined more than 450,000 hospital encounters (485016 is the precise number) at some 2837 facilities (with 21963 hospitalists), as well as 839512 encounters at 3195 acute care facilities (with 50079 physicians) for this study. Interestingly, they found greater variation among individual medical professionals at the same facility than the averages across hospitals.

Most importantly, spending more money did not improve the patient’s 30 day mortality- or the need for readmission. That was true whether the practitioner was an internist or a hospitalist. So, that extra money provides no value whatsoever except to the pockets of the practitioner or the hospital. (The difference between the most expensive encounter and the least expensive encounter was 40%, with the highest cost accruing to the hospitalists at $ 1055 on the average.)

The researchers examined physician-related spending—such as fees for reading an X-ray or examining a patient for nearly 22,000 physicians who work exclusively in hospitals.   (These specialists are known as hospitalists.) The spending analysis didn’t include hospital costs for patients’ visits.

Part of the reasons for such extensive data collection was to factor out the chance that acutely ill patients may be present in one venue and not another, or that the patient issues were complex.

Moreover, all the patients were Medicare patients (between 2011 and 2014).  These are supposedly more regulated costs.

 

 

Getting ready to do your taxes yourself?   This will inform you of what has changed for this year’s filing season.  (Of course, you can contact us-  we’ll ensure that you pay the lowest amount of taxes required by law. 🙂 )