Addressing Avoidable Healthcare Costs: Time to Cool Off on Hotspotting in Primary Care?

One increasingly popular strategy for addressing avoidable healthcare costs is to couple “hotspotting” with interventions that deliver expanded, more intense primary care services to high-cost patient populations. While there is rationale for such intensive primary care programs, early results have...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of general internal medicine : JGIM 2019-11, Vol.34 (11), p.2634-2636
Main Authors: Marcotte, Leah M., Reddy, Ashok, Liao, Joshua
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Health care
Internal Medicine
Medical innovations
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Patients
Perspective
Populations
Primary care
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Summary:One increasingly popular strategy for addressing avoidable healthcare costs is to couple “hotspotting” with interventions that deliver expanded, more intense primary care services to high-cost patient populations. While there is rationale for such intensive primary care programs, early results have been lackluster. Geoffrey Rose’s preventive medicine strategy provides insight about a potential explanation: that the narrow scope of these initiatives on small groups of high-cost patients may inherently prevent them from achieving overall cost reductions across entire patient populations. While additional work and results from innovative non-healthcare-based interventions are needed, healthcare organizations may benefit from instead investing in broader interventions that impact patients across cost levels, including average- or low-cost patients.
ISSN:0884-8734
1525-1497
DOI:10.1007/s11606-019-05285-z