Medical services utilization and charge comparisons between elderly patients with and without Alzheimer's disease in a managed care organization

Objectives: The purposes of this study were to describe the health service utilization patterns and the associated charges for elderly patients (aged greater than or equal to 65 years) diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) enrolled in a managed care organization (MCO), and to compare these patterns and charges with those of elderly enrollees not diagnosed with AD (non-AD). Methods: We analyzed medical claims data over a 12-month period for the population of elderly patients with a diagnosis of AD or AD-related dementia, and for all other elderly patients enrolled in an integrated MCO. Comparisons were made at the level of service location leg, inpatient hospital, outpatient hospital, physician's office). Results: For a total of 250 patients diagnosed with AD (66.0% female, 34.0% male; mean age, 80.5 years), health care charges were 1.6 times higher per patient per year than the corresponding charges for 13,553 non-AD patients (58.6% female, 41.4% male; mean age, 73.3 years). AD patients received 1.7 times more health care services per patient per year than their non-AD counterparts. Conclusions: Despite the lack of nursing home and prescription drug data, our results show that AD patients in this MCO used more health care services and had higher annual medical care charges than non-AD patients. If MCOs conduct similar analyses of elderly AD patients' patterns of care and compare these with the patterns of elderly non-AD patients, they may be able to pinpoint areas of disparity in medical care and improve service delivery for AD patients.