Dive Brief:
- The Health Care Cost Institute(HCCI) reported Monday spending for people with diabetes who are covered by employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) increased at a faster pace (6%) than for people without the condition (3.2%), reaching $16,021 per capita in 2014.
- The institute's 2014 diabetes healthcare cost and utilization study found spending for diabetics saw an increase of $897 from 2013, and it was partly attributed to the rise of ER visits and prescription drug use among diabetics between 2012 and 2014.
- Diabetics visited a doctor or an ER twice as much as people without diabetes, with the annual rate rising to 8.1%, between the years studied, according to HCCI. Also, diabetics "took over five times more prescription drugs than those without diabetes," HCCI stated, and used more mental health and cardiovascular disease-related services at higher rates.
Dive Insight:
HCCI's report, which was based on more than 40 million healthcare claims from ESI-covered Americans younger than 65, looked into "how much is spent on healthcare for adults and children with diabetes, where those dollars are spent, and how that compares to people without diabetes."
“Understanding how and where we spend healthcare dollars for people with diabetes is the first step in assessing how well the healthcare system is working and where improvements can be made,” HCCI Senior Researcher Amanda Frost said in a statement.
In 2014, people with diabetes, which is among the leading causes of deaths in the country and affects nearly 10% of the population, accounted for 5% of the ESI population, HCCI reported.
The American Diabetes Association (ADA) and IBM Watson Health jointly announced earlier this month a partnership to create digital tools aimed at contributing to diabetes research and to launch a developer challenge for apps that can incorporate cognitive computing and a store of data.