Nearly one in five Medicare patients in the U.S. experience adverse medical events, according to new research published in the Injury Prevention journal.
Researchers used seven years of data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey linked with non-respondent claims filed, which resulted in the analysis of 12,541 beneficiaries.
Nineteen percent of those beneficiaries experienced at least one adverse event. Most of the adverse events — 62 percent — occur in outpatient settings, the study found.
Survival rates between those who suffered an adverse event and those who did not are also noteworthy: 55 percent of patients who sustained an adverse event survived through the end of the study, while nearly 80 percent of those who did not suffer an adverse event survived.
"Study findings indicate that AMEs pose significant risk to the health and well-being of older Medicare beneficiaries, while the effects of AMEs are observed long after the initial episode has concluded," the study authors wrote. "Because more than half of AMEs were identified outside of hospital settings, efforts to reduce preventable AMEs…require public health efforts that target both inpatient and outpatient healthcare settings."
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