 | The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
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| The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
Alex Z. Fu, MS and Gordon G. Liu, PhD. Pharmaceutical Policy and Evaluative Sciences, School of Pharmacy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 205-B Beard Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7360
OBJECTIVE: Inappropriate prescribing can cause significant adverse events for all age groups. It perhaps would be most costly when it happens to the elderly in particular. Most existing studies explored the high prevalence and demographic variables as risk factors of inappropriate prescribing. This study examines the healthcare cost and utilization outcomes of inappropriate drug use by the elderly at the national level.
METHOD: Inappropriate medications were defined by well-accepted Beers explicit criteria. OLS and negative binomial models were employed to estimate the functions with different dependent variables using the 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), a national representative sample of the non-institutionalized populations. In order to generalize the result to the whole US nation, complex survey sample design was adjusted in modeling.
RESULTS: Compared with elderly using proper medications, inappropriate prescription use alone increases the total health expenditure by 17.4 percent (p < 0.05), independent of patients’ health status and disease conditions. It also increases the numbers of outpatient visit, emergency room visit, and hospital discharge by 0.23 (p < 0.001), 0.38 (p < 0.01), 0.23 (p = 0.05) respectively per person. Moreover, other predictive variables of healthcare expenditure and utilization include poor health status, chronic diseases, and total number of medication use.
CONCLUSION: This study identified increased quantified healthcare resources with elderly population due to inappropriate prescription use. It suggests the necessity of health policy to improve medication use in the aged group in an effort to save healthcare dollars while maintaining quality of care.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Prescription Drug Use Patterns, Health Care Utilization
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.