This site uses cookies that are essential for our site to work. We would also like to use non-essential cookies to help us improve your browsing experience and help make this website better, by collecting and reporting information on how you use our site.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report that in 2012, over 49 million individuals were covered by Medicare, at an average cost of $10,830 per beneficiary.
The total cost of health care services for any individual is influenced by many factors, including age, sex, and location. However, the presence of chronic conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, and depression, has an overwhelming effect on the cost of care and utilization of healthcare services for individuals from all walks of life.
In 2013, CMS introduced their Chronic Conditions Data Warehouse to help document the prevalence and impact of chronic conditions on the cost of care in the Medicare program. The website serves as a data repository and also provides an interactive dashboard, offering varying levels of granularity for different types of users. Although all the data are focused on a specific group — Medicare beneficiaries — the concepts behind these data extend well beyond any one group.
For example, how do different chronic conditions, and combinations of conditions (or comorbidities), affect the cost of care across large populations?
With this force-directed bubble plot, we have visualized the contents of the 2012 CMS Chronic Conditions Public Use File, which presents beneficiary counts and average Medicare payments by beneficiary sex, age range, and combination of eleven different chronic conditions: Alzheimer’s Disease and Senile Dementia, Cancer, Heart Failure, Chronic Kidney Disease, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Depression, Diabetes, Ischemic Heart Disease, Osteoporosis, Rheumatoid Arthritis and Osteoarthritis Arthritis, and Stroke and Transient Ischemic Attack.
Each bubble represents a cohort of beneficiaries with a specific combination of one, two, or three conditions. The size of each bubble represents the number of beneficiaries with that combination of conditions; the height represents the average annual cost of care for Medicare Part A and Part B services for year-round eligible beneficiaries. As one accumulates additional conditions, documented by lines drawn from the lower, less complex cases to the higher, more complex cases, we can see, in striking detail, the dramatic cost of comorbidities on patients and on the entire healthcare system.
Details
D3.js SVG, with Illustrator. Data extracted from 2012 CMS Chronic Conditions Public Use File
Healthcare’s post-pandemic reality is a strained and exhausted system. It’s facing an uphill battle to provide high quality care as more and more challenges arise including inflation and a winter “tripledemic” of COVID-19, flu, and RSV that threatens to overwhelm hospitals and burnt out physicians.
As healthcare consolidation continues, Arcadia Director of Sales, Graham Barnes, and NorthShore SVP of CIN, Scott Kent, discuss the critical steps that leaders need to take to ensure a successful integration.
From payers to providers to patients, we’re going to explore why SDoH is so important to our healthcare system and how everybody has a role to play in improving population health outcomes.
Understanding social determinants of health can unlock better outcomes and more efficiency in healthcare. Learn what’s measured under the umbrella of SDoH.
Michael Meucci from Arcadia and Frank Ingari from Tandigm Health discuss promising solutions for easing some of the greatest pressures threatening to compromise the U.S. healthcare system.