Emergency Surgeries Are a Huge Drain on Health Care System
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iStock/Thinkstock(BOSTON) — Saving $100 billion in health care costs over a 10-year period is nothing to sneeze at.
The key, according to study author Dr. Adil Haider, is by performing ten percent of all emergency surgeries electively.
Haider, who heads the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, says that surgical care makes up about three-tenths of all health care costs in the U.S. Without changes to the system, these expenditures will total somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 billion dollars over a decade.
By analyzing the data of 600,000 patients from 2001 through 2010, Haider and his team estimated that emergency procedures involving aortic aneurysm repairs, coronary artery bypass grafts and colon resection were far more costly than if the operations were planned.
In addition, Haider asserted, “Elective procedures are better for patients, too, who experience lower rates of mortality and better outcomes.”
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