Abstract
Objective
Our initial report analyzed clinical and cost utilization data from the years 1999
to 2002 for an integrative medicine independent physician association (IPA) whose
primary care physicians (PCPs) were exclusively doctors of chiropractic. This report
updates the subsequent utilization data from the IPA for the years 2003 to 2005 and
includes first-time comparisons in data points among PCPs of different licensures
who were oriented toward complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
Methods
Independent physician association–incurred claims and stratified random patient surveys
were descriptively analyzed for clinical utilization, cost offsets, and member satisfaction
compared with conventional medical IPA normative values. Comparisons to our original
publication's comparative blinded data, using nonrandom matched comparison groups,
were descriptively analyzed for differences in age/sex demographics and disease profiles
to examine sample bias.
Results
Clinical and cost utilization based on 70274 member-months over a 7-year period demonstrated decreases of 60.2% in-hospital
admissions, 59.0% hospital days, 62.0% outpatient surgeries and procedures, and 85%
pharmaceutical costs when compared with conventional medicine IPA performance for
the same health maintenance organization product in the same geography and time frame.
Conclusion
During the past 7 years, and with a larger population than originally reported, the
CAM-oriented PCPs using a nonsurgical/nonpharmaceutical approach demonstrated reductions
in both clinical and cost utilization when compared with PCPs using conventional medicine
alone. Decreased utilization was uniformly achieved by all CAM-oriented PCPs, regardless
of their licensure. The validity and generalizability of this observation are guarded
given the lack of randomization, lack of statistical analysis possible, and potentially
biased data in this population.
Key Indexing Terms
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
January 2,
2007
Received in revised form:
December 17,
2006
Received:
September 20,
2006
Identification
Copyright
© 2007 National University of Health Sciences. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
