Study Shows Chiropractic Cost Effective in Managed CareCost for back and neck care "substantially lower for chiropractic patients"While the cost effectiveness of chiropractic care is well demonstrated and established in the minds of many, what about chiropractic care delivered in a managed care system? This question has undoubtedly been asked in the board rooms of managed care corporations across the United States. The answer to that question came in the March 1996 issue of the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC). The AJMC is a new publication that refers to itself as "the forum for peer-reviewed literature on managed healthcare." A paper by Mosley et al. in that issue, "Cost-Effectiveness of Chiropractic Care in a Managed Care Setting,"1 came to some interesting conclusions, several of which were surprising. The study looked at patients of an "independent physician model HMO" operating in Louisiana. The abstract tells the story:
One interesting finding of the study was that chiropractors used diagnostic imaging much less frequently than the non-chiropractic group (4.9% of the time, versus 16.5%). And it came as no surprise that the non-chiropractic patients received twice as many prescriptions. But the appearance of similar satisfaction scores and surgical rates in the Mosley et al. study are surprising findings and raise a number of questions. For example, there's a study that has demonstrated three times the patient satisfaction with chiropractic care than convention medical care for low back pain.2 It is quite possible that the size of the population in the Mosley et al. study was too small to reveal potential differences. Mosley et al. did however make two comments that we would like to hear echo down the halls of managed care:
"We are somewhat puzzled by the relatively low proportion of HMO members who chose chiropractic care for back pain when compared with published figures.3 This phenomenon merits additional study in our sample. If even half the study patients treated by traditional therapies could have been cared for in the chiropractic setting, the annual savings would have exceeded $215,000." References
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Dynamic Chiropractic - May 6, 1996, Volume 14, Issue 10