Getting in front of health risks like obesity could be a way to offset rising care costs. Anthony Brino explains:
As health plans start serving newly-insured populations and try to improve outcomes for long-time patients, all while taking on more financial risk, the case for aggressively targeting diabetes and obesity has never been greater.
About 20 percent of Americans over the age of 20 have metabolic syndrome — a mix of excess weight or obesity, high blood pressure, cholesterol imbalance, and prediabetic high blood sugar — and if current trends of obesity and physical inactivity continue, one-third of US adults will have diabetes by 2050, warn Charles Hennekens, MD, and colleagues in a call-to-action published in the American Journal of Managed Care.
Unabated, these trends will almost certainly bring a spike in treatment of cardiovascular disease, extremity disease, kidney failure, blindness and more, straining public and private healthcare budgets and also challenging the new business models of population health.
Hennekens, a professor of medicine at Florida Atlantic University, argues that healthcare organizations need to "aggressively utilize a multifactorial approach to risk reduction" using everything from lifestyle interventions to evidence-based drug therapies.
Health plans — with views of individual health histories, influence of workplace wellness programs and control of benefit designs — have an important role to play in both connecting at-risk members with clinical treatment and facilitating and initiating lifestyle changes.
Investing in diabetes prevention through diet and exercise interventions — like L.A. Care Health Plan’s new virtual lifestyle management program for obese members — could lead to significant savings for public and private payers in the long-run, by helping individuals avoid acute care for cardiovascular disease.
And now is the time to do it, argue Hennekens and colleagues.
For more information, please read the original article at Government Health IT.