Geriatric Care Management Blog

Elders have more health care issues and have more doctors’ office visits and more hospitalizations than their younger counterparts.  Where about one in four 18-44 year olds report no visits to a health care professional in the past year, two out of three 75+ year old patients have seen a health care professional four or more times in that same time.  More than a quarter of 75+ year olds report in excess of ten visits a year.  What may not be as obvious is that seniors also require more and different recovery help from their medical episodes, especially those that have required hospitalization.

Hospitalization can be the “perfect storm” for older patients, because they have potentially more medical issues in the first place.  Second, everyone is discharged as soon as possible from hospitals these days, because insurance typically pays for the condition, not the days.  Some in the hospital business refer to this kind of logic as “discharging sicker quicker.”  A third factor can also be added, and that is the mental processing ability of an older patient is more challenged by the assault of a hospitalization, especially the discharge process.  In a study recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and reported by UPI, a researcher named Lee Linquist and colleagues followed a group of 200 patients 70 years and older.  Although all these patients lived independently in their own communities and none had been diagnosed with dementia or other cognitive medical issues, fully one-third were diagnosed with low cognition post-discharge.  The good news is that with special post-discharge care, nearly three-fifths of these same patients improved in the areas of orientation, registration, repetition, comprehension, naming, reading, writing and calculation.

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