While disease prevention efforts are important to an individual’s health, they may not actually yield cost savings for the overall health-care system, reports the WSJ . The cost benefit of preventive efforts is particularly suspect when a program targets everyone in a population, or if very expensive efforts are spent following people who already have disease. That’s because most people targeted won’t actually get sick and behavior change is difficult to achieve. In one large prevention program with 200,000 Medicare participants who had chronic health conditions, nurses checked up on patients to see if they were taking their medicines and reducing sodium intake. They mailed patients information about their disease and told them about health classes in the community. But the program didn’t improve patients’ health. It also didn’t

lower patients’ Medicare payments by as much as the cost of the prevention services. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the WSJ that the current health-care model is too focused on disease and there isn’t a lot of proof about prevention efforts “because there haven’t been enough consistent strategies in place.” And should cost even be the criteria by which disease prevention efforts are measured, anyway? We don’t think of other advances in health-care that way, said Steven Woolf , a professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. “When a new imaging device comes out, or a new antibiotic, we don’t say, ‘Does it save money?’” he told the WSJ. Photo: Associated Press

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Does Preventing Disease Really Save Money?