CMS has just released a new interactive tool that allows users to examine chronic conditions among Medicare beneficiaries. The CMS Chronic Conditions Dashboard presents statistical views of information on the prevalence, utilization and Medicare spending for Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions. The Dashboard displays information on a set of predefined chronic conditions available in the Chronic Condition Warehouse (CCW) at both the national and state level for 2011. This set of chronic conditions is consistent with the list of conditions included in the currently available 2012 edition of the CMS chartbook, “Chronic Conditions among Medicare Beneficiaries”.
The statistics in the Dashboard include:
- The prevalence of Medicare beneficiaries with the specific 15 conditions
- The prevalence and per capita Medicare spending for beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions, based upon counting the number of conditions from the set of 15 conditions
- Utilization metrics for 30-day hospital readmissions and emergency department visits by the number of chronic conditions.
In addition to the information being available at the state and national levels, the Dashboard also allows the user to select information for specific beneficiary sub-groups defined by gender, age group or dual eligibility status.
from pg 21:
“Beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions accounted for almost all Medicare hospital readmissions.”
from the chart: Medicare FFS beneficiaries with 2 or more chronic conditions accounted for 98% of Medicare [FFS] hospital readmissions.
98% !!!
But that’s not quite as dramatic as it seems at first glance, when you realize that “2 or more CCs” encompasses 68% of the study population, since only 32% have 0-1 CCs.
However, the 14% of the Medicare population with 6 or more chronic conditions does account for 70% of all the readmissions.
If you are targeting readmissions … and who isn’t … this is a clear pointer on where to start.