Centerfield

Who Knew?

Too much heath care for the elderly can be hazardous to their health. Seriously.

A recent study indicates that overuse of health care for chronically ill patients results in higher spending (duh!) and higher mortality for the same conditions.

Researchers did not measure whether those who died in Utah got better or worse care than patients in New Jersey. But they did try to monitor care by following three types of patients for up to five years after they suffered a heart attack, a fractured hip, or a colectomy for colon cancer. For each illness, they found higher mortality rates for patients in the regions with the most intense care.

One speculation is that overuse of health care greatly increases the odds of medical error and iatrogenic complications.

Dr. John E. Wennberg, director of the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School, said the higher mortality rates in some regions could be caused in part by medical error.

"There's a lot of concern about medical errors," Wennberg said. "If you hospitalize people twice as often in a community on a per capita basis, you have twice the risk of having a medical error problem."

Wennberg said another policy ramification for the government to consider is hospital capacity. The more hospital beds there are per capita, the greater the likelihood the patient will be admitted.

"We need to redirect resources away from acute care and invest in infrastructure that can better coordinate and integrate care outside of hospitals - for example, home health and hospice care," the report said.

Also duh.