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March 30, 2015 at 12:04 PM
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) seems to be increasing the odds that physicians’ patients will have health coverage without increasing the odds that the patients will have complicated health problems.
Analysts at athenahealth, a medical practice support services company, have published data supporting those conclusions in a summary of results from an analysis of 15,000 medical services providers that use athenahealth’s cloud-based practice management system.
The sample is not a random sample. The providers are less likely than the average provider to be working in a clinic affiliated with an academic medical center, and more likely to be located in the South. They are also comfortable enough with computers to be using a cloud-based practice management system.
But the company has been using its data to try to give PPACA watchers a rough idea of how PPACA is changing medical practices. In the latest report, the analysts look at year-over-year changes in practices’ new patients.
The new patients who appeared in 2014 were about as healthy as the new patients who showed up in 2013, the analysts say.
The percentage of new patients who had high blood pressure, for example, fell to 13.3 percent in 2014, from 13.4 percent in 2013, and the percentage who had diabetes held steady at 6.6 percent.
