Medicare Disease Management Pilot Fails To Cut Costs or Boost Quality

A Medicare disease management pilot, the Medicare Health Support Pilot Program, failed to improve patient care quality or reduce costs of care. A comparison of the disease management program participants' outcomes to a control group that received usual care found no difference in hospital admissions or emergency room visits. There were no demonstrable savings in Medicare expenditures between the two groups. These are findings of “Results of the Medicare Health Support Disease-Management Pilot Program” by Nancy McCall, Sc.D., and Jerry Cromwell, Ph.D. They compared outcomes for the 163,107 patients randomized to the intervention group with the . . .