|
EMBARGOED FOR RELASE: CONTACT:
Thursday, February 14, 2008 Catherine Bromberg
617-636-0206
cbromberg@tufts-nemc.org
The US Presidential Candidates’ Focus on Preventive Care for Health Care Reform: Tufts-NEMC Researchers Examine Statements that Prevention Will Save Money
Boston, Mass. – With the issue of skyrocketing health care costs at the forefront of the US 2008 presidential campaign, researchers from Tufts-New England Medical Center (Tufts-NEMC) have examined the costs and benefits of preventive care versus treatment, and found some surprising results. They presented an overview of their findings in an editorial in the February 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Presidential candidates from both main parties have unveiled plans to ensure better access to and affordability for high quality health care. Many of these plans include a substantial focus on preventive care measures as a means of controlling costs.
“There’s no question that we could save American lives through preventive health measures to help people quit smoking, improve their diets, and exercise more,” said Joshua T. Cohen, PhD, lead author of the editorial and a faculty member at Tufts-NEMC’s Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies/Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR). “Bad habits in these areas are estimated to be responsible for 900,000 deaths a year – nearly 40 percent of all mortality in the US. But we found that sweeping claims about the cost-saving potential of prevention are over-stated.”
Cohen and his colleagues, including Peter J. Neumann, ScD, co-author and Director of Tufts-NEMC’s CVER, performed a systematic review of 599 published cost-effectiveness studies through 2005. They found that opportunities for efficient investment in health care programs were divided roughly equally between prevention and treatment, and in some cases, treatment proved the most effective and cost-efficient option. Whether prevention delivers good value can depend strongly on how common the targeted disease is. Sometimes a prevention program that delivers poor value when applied in the general population can be highly efficient when it targets a high risk group.
“Our findings suggest that the broad generalizations made by many presidential candidates can be misleading,” Neumann said. “Careful analysis of the costs and benefits of specific interventions, rather than broad generalizations, is essential. In addition to determining which preventive measures and treatments are most efficient, and for whom they work best, we’ll also need to identify prevention and treatment options that are under- and over-utilized in the general population. Then whoever is next in the White House can help fashion policies that would encourage more cost-effective delivery of health care based on the evidence.”
About Tufts-New England Medical Center and Floating Hospital for Children:
Tufts-New England Medical Center is an exceptional, not-for-profit, 451-bed academic medical center that is home to both a full-service hospital for adults and the Floating Hospital for Children. Conveniently located in downtown Boston, the Medical Center is the principal teaching hospital for Tufts University School of Medicine. Founded in 1796 as the Boston Dispensary, Tufts-NEMC is the oldest permanent medical facility in New England and one of the first hospitals in the nation. For more than 200 years, Tufts-NEMC has pioneered innovative programs in clinical care and research and is a recognized leader in cancer care, cardiology, neurosciences, organ transplantation and pediatrics.
About the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR)
CVER is a center within Tufts-NEMC’s Institute of Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies (ICRHPS) focused on issues pertaining to value, cost-effectiveness, and risk in health care decisions. The Center's mission is to assess benefit-risk tradeoffs in health care choices and public health interventions, and to help decision makers target resources to improve health more efficiently and effectively. Center researchers bring experience in economics and decision analysis to a host of clinical and public health policy issues. The work encompasses formal cost-effectiveness analysis and related techniques, as well as policy research and analysis pertaining to resource allocation in health care.
###
|