In health care, does “hotspotting” make patients better?
The new health care practice of “hotspotting” — in which providers identify very high-cost patients and attempt to reduce their medical spending while improving care — has virtually no impact on patient outcomes, according to a new study led by MIT economists. The finding underscores the challenge of reducing spending on “superutilizers” of health care, the roughly 5 percent of patients in the U.S. who account for half the nation’s health care costs. The concept of hotspotting, a little more than a decade old, consists of programs that give at-risk patients sustained contact with doctors, other caregivers, and social service providers, in an attempt to prevent rehospitalizations and other intensive, expensive forms of care. The MIT study was developed in cooperation with the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, which runs one of the nation’s best-known hotspotting programs. The researchers conducted a four-year analysis of the program and found that being enrolled in...