Agenda - 03-09-1999 - III-B - Laserfiche WebLink

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ADULT HEALTH ► Indicator 20: Preventable Hospitaliza- tions per 1,000 Adults 21 -64 Years Old Indicator 20 depicts, for total and Medicaid working -age adults, rates of hospitalization for conditions that might have been prevented or ameliorated by adequate and timely primary care. Higher rates for Medicaid enrollees may suggest that there are barriers to ambulatory care for those individuals. Based on results for 1990 -92, Medicaid en- rollees are at far greater risk than total adults for potentially preventable hospitalizations. One confounding factor may be, however, that a majority of Medicaid adults are women. Counts of Medicaid enrollees by sex were not available to compute the sex - specific rates in order to investigate that potential bias. Carolina Access is a new program to provide a more efficient and effective health cart system for Medicaid recipients by linking them to primary care providers who deliver and coordinate their health care. Begun as a demonstration project in April 1991, the program had expanded to 38 coun- ties with 221,023 enrollees as of December 1, 1995. This represented about 27 percent of Med- icaid enrollees statewide. Almost all states and D.C. now have man- aged care plans for Medicaid recipients, involv- ing about one - quarter of the Medicaid popula- tion nationally. Future updates of this report should examine Indicator 20 for Carolina Access counties ver- sus others. After several years of experience with the program, Medicaid enrollees in partici- pating counties should not be at excess risk for potentially preventable hospitalizations. Indica- tor 20 also needs to be examined for men ver- sus women to assess the extent of any sex bias in the results. 120 1 i r r r r r 1 Rates of Preventable Hospitalizations* 11 discharges �•V WMedicald discharges Access to Health Care in North Carolina il 177 r • r r