Word: chronical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...past year, the health-care service has piloted two home-monitoring programs for patients with diabetes and those on blood-thinning medication - groups at high risk of emergency hospitalization. At Frederiksberg Hospital, Dr. Phanareth is running a ground-breaking study to test whether patients with exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease - responsible for 10% of all hospital admissions in Denmark - can be treated at home using telemedicine technology. "Sometimes, a lack of resistance is all you need for change to happen," Phanareth says...
Germany: Easing the burden of chronic disease; strengthening peer review...
Sudden illness may be what scares most people, but chronic conditions place the greatest strain on health care. Around 75% of the U.S.'s $2 trillion annual health-care expenditure goes toward ailments such as heart disease, asthma, diabetes and certain cancers, and the vast majority of that is spent when these conditions require hospitalization and emergency care. The problem is particularly acute in the U.S. public sector: over 20% of U.S. Medicare patients have five or more chronic illnesses...
Preventing these conditions from developing in the first place is helped by a holistic approach to preventive medicine that encourages changes in what people eat or how much exercise they get. But for those patients already battling a chronic illness, there are steps health-care providers can take to keep them stable and out of hospital - as Germany's experience shows. The solutions can be as simple as educating patients about their condition, having nurses call patients to make sure they are staying on top of their medication and allowing doctors to compare their success rate with other physicians...
Germany's "disease-management programs" began in 2002 and cover some 3 million chronic patients. The results are promising. One survey by the University of Heidelberg of some 11,000 patients in the Saxony Anhalt and Rhineland-Palatinate regions found that the death rate in older diabetics in the program was about 8% lower than among diabetics who received regular care. And when one of Germany's largest insurers tracked 20,000 coronary heart disease and diabetes patients enrolled in disease-management programs for 15 months, it found the percentage of patients requiring hospitalization dropped from...