Healthcare utilization and costs among high-need and frail Mexican American Medicare beneficiaries

Objectives: To examine Medicare health care spending and health services utilization among high-need population segments in older Mexican Americans, and to examine the association of frailty on health care spending and utilization. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of the innovative linkage of Medicare data with the Hispanic Established Populations for the Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly (H-EPESE) were used. There were 863 participants, which contributed 1,629 person years of information. Frailty, cognition, and social risk factors were identified from the H-EPESE, and chronic conditions were identified from the Medicare file. The Cost and Use file was used to calculate four categories of Medicare spending on: hospital services, physician services, post-acute care services, and other services. Generalized estimating equations (GEE) with a log link gamma distribution and first order autoregressive, correlation matrix was used to estimate cost ratios (CR) of population segments, and GEE with a logit link binomial distribution was applied to estimate odds ratios (OR) of healthcare use. Results: Participants in the major complex chronic illness segment who were also pre-frail or frail had higher total costs and utilization compared to the healthy segment. The CR for total Medicare spending was 3.05 (95% CI, 2.48–3.75). Similarly, this group had higher odds of being classified in the high-cost category 5.86 (95% CI, 3.35–10.25), nursing home care utilization 11.32 (95% CI, 3.88–33.02), hospitalizations 4.12 (95% CI, 2.88–5.90) and emergency room admissions 4.24 (95% CI, 3.04–5.91). Discussion: Our findings highlight that frailty assessment is an important consideration when identifying high-need and high-cost patients.