Chronic diseases are the leading driver of escalating health care costs in America, accounting for an estimated 85 percent of total expenditures. Managing the underlying symptoms and tracking progress is a daily struggle for patients, with most of it happening outside the physician’s office. New research, kicked off last week, will hopefully provide some better tools to manage care and costs.
Project HealthDesign announced the recipients of five new two-year grants totaling $2.4 million, provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to study how the capture of key patient data can improve the treatment of chronic conditions.
Defined as any disease that is long-lasting or recurrent, the list of chronic diseases includes conditions like diabetes, hypertension, arthritis and respiratory disease. A recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report detailed their alarming growth and impact:
- The number of people with chronic conditions is rapidly rising. Between 2000 and 2030, the number of Americans with one or more chronic conditions will increase about 37 percent, an increase of almost 50 million people. In 2010, an estimated 141 million Americans have at least one condition.
- Some 28 percent of Americans have two or more chronic conditions and they are responsible for two-thirds of health care spending.
- In the Medicare program over two-thirds of the expenditures are for beneficiaries with five or more chronic conditions.
If we are going to ever “bend the cost curve” of health care, Americans need to have tools to help them control, if not improve, the effect that chronic diseases have on their health. The care plans that their providers create need to be based on more than just the clinical data and observations found in their patient chart at the clinic.
By capturing their daily ups and downs, patients can provide their physicians with a more complete picture of the many variables that affect their condition. Data points such as sleep quality, diet, moods and pain provide a richer set of information for better tweaking of treatment regimens, medications and therapy.
Project HealthDesign, a program launched in 2006, is redefining personal health records to include these “observations of daily living,” or ODLs, then linking them with a provider’s office-based electronic medical record. PHD is led by a team of experts working in health information technology and patient-centered care at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Last week, in a separate announcement, GE Healthcare, Intel and the Mayo Clinic unveiled a collaboration on a year-long study of home monitoring applications. The team will follow 200 high-risk Mayo patients over the age of 60, to see if daily electronic reporting of key data related to their chronic diseases could provide clinicians with early warning signs of deteriorating symptoms. The hope is that with earlier intervention, the number of hospitalizations and emergency department visits will decrease.
While Washington figures out health care finance reform, research and new programs like these will help reform the actual delivery of higher quality health care as efficiently as possible.
Photo credit: southerntabitha
from: http://healthcare.change.org/blog/view/could_your_computer_be_the_key_to_chronic_disease_management
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