NCCI, with the assistance of payer medical directors (shout out to Employers’ Dwight Robertson MD and David Deitz MD among others) presented on 4 research topic areas late Thursday afternoon.
After a long day of great talks (this NCCI has been the best I’ve been to in a dozen plus years) it was time for the real dense, pithy stuff. I’ll summarize so you don’t have to write your own notes…There’s some really good stuff here.
Joint injuries
Barry Lipton discussed an analysis of knee surgery across six states; you may be surprised to hear costs, even after correcting for price variations, ranged rather dramatically across the six – by around 60 percent. What’s a lot more surprising is the variation in diagnoses, particularly among strains. The percentage of knee injuries that were attributed to strains varied by somewhere around 20 points from highest to lowest state.
Shoulders exhibited differences as well, however there were similarities between the two joints. Namely, the variation in utilization for both was driven by surgery and physical medicine. A question from the audience asked why there is such variation when treatment should be uniform…
Therein lies the issue. According to the handout, “Utilization differences across our selected states are driven more by differences in the treatment for given diagnoses than to the mix of diagnoses.”
There was quite a bit more to Barry’s presentation; check out NCCI for more.
Next up, Drug Fee Schedules
NCCI looked at differences in the prices paid for drugs in an effort to assess the effect of fee schedules [FS] on prices paid. Some quick highlights from Natasha Moore’s talk…
- Just because states have similar fee schedules doesn’t mean the prices paid for drugs will be similar.
- Prices in high FS states are generally higher than states without fee schedules
- There’s quite a bit of variation in prices paid even a) after correcting for drug mix and b) among states with similar fee schedule levels.
- However, lower fee schedules are correlated with lower prices paid.
- Brand drugs are 22% of scripts, but 56% of cost
Time from injury to treatment – preliminary results
NCCI is workign on a long term study on the impact of the Affordable Care Act; their first effort focuses on time from injury to treatment. Highlights are from data between 7/1/2010 – 12/31/2012:
- 85% of trauma cases are treated within 3 days from date of injury
- there are longer “delays” in seeing some specialists in some states
My view is this is not likely to bear much fruit; looking at time to treatment by specialist as a way to somehow evaluate the impact of ACA is likely to be confounded by multiple issues, including:
- practice pattern variation
- supply of various provider specialties
- expansion of Medicaid – or not
- state support of ACA enrollment e.g. California vs those antipathetic to ACA e.g. Texas
Perhaps an analysis holding provider populations level and using the uninsured rate would be more illuminating.
Impact of report lag on claim severity
Following on the ground-breaking work by the Hartford’s Glen Pitruzzello fifteen years back, NCCI looked at the impact of claim reporting lag on claim severity.
There’s a wealth of data shared; the net is the longer the delay, the more likely the claim will cost more – HOWEVER, the correlation is by no means linear and varies by type of injury (e.g. the most expensive fractures are those reported on the actual date of injury, next is during the first week).
A long day indeed…
