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medpundit |
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Thursday, April 10, 2003Under the program, participating companies will pay doctors thousands of dollars in bonuses for each worker whose care improves. For instance, a participating physician would get $100 yearly for each diabetic person whose blood pressure, blood sugar and lipid levels are sufficiently measured and controlled. Just 150 patients would net a doctor $15,000 extra a year. The idea is that people with better lab values and blood pressure will be healthier, miss less work, and have fewer hospitalizations, thus save companies money. But, although patients who meet the parameters may have better long term outcomes (i.e. live longer and have complications later in life instead of early in life), it isn’t at all clear that they’ll be cheaper to take care of. The program is set up to encourage doctors to use medication over lifestyle modification, and to use the medication aggressively. Expect patients to be on two or three blood pressure medications, two or three diabetes medications, and two or three cholesterol lowering medications to achieve all of the measurable goals. Not only is this expensive (easily hundreds of dollars a month), but it has great potential to increase side effects from drugs as well as drug interactions. And it won’t completely eliminate hospitalizations due to diabetes and heart disease. It may decrease them, but it won’t eliminate them. By how much it will decrease them remains to be seen. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I give it about two to five years before it’s abandoned. posted by Sydney on 4/10/2003 07:56:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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