Primary care doctors, such as Innovative Family Health, play a big role in preventive care. Some preventive health care is covered by your insurance while other preventive care may require a few. Either way, analysis shows that many patients can save around $6,000 to $8,000 yearly by utilizing preventive care.
So, how do you measure the importance of preventive care? First, let’s agree on a definition.
What is Preventive Care?
At Innovative Family Health, we think of preventive health care as any type of care that is aimed at keeping you well. This includes annual physicals, well-woman appointments and colonoscopies. It also includes pharmaceuticals such as immunizations and allergy medications. Screenings for high cholesterol or skin cancer are preventive.
Most blood work is looking for problems that need to be addressed. While this may not prevent an illness, it reduces the chances of a health problem leading to emergency care and/or hospitalization.
Preventive care is also managing a chronic illness with the dual aims of improving the patient’s life and keeping the patient from needing more extensive, more expensive care. Perhaps you can’t prevent a chronic disease, but you can prevent things from getting worse.
Prevention and recovery care are also closely linked. That’s why Innovative Family Health includes physical rehabilitation as one of its core services.
What is the Monetary Value of Preventive Care?
If you are weighing the pros and cons of any expense associated with preventive health care, consider this. Hospital bills are the number one cause for bankruptcy in the United States. Good primary care is the key to preventing those expensive hospital stays.
Second, unchecked health problems force people into retirement early. This deprives them of income and generally reduces their retirement savings. One survey showed that 46 percent of retirees did so involuntarily due to a chronic health condition or a health crisis.
Here’s another way to look at it. The average person pays between $84 and $131 for a doctor’s visit before deductibles or copays. That same person will find themselves spending $98 to $163 at an urgent care center. In the ER, that same treatment would be from $358 to $1,595.
What Chronic Illnesses Need Preventive Health Care?
The leading causes of death are stroke, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cancer. If a patient is willing to deal with root causes early, they have the best chance of staying out of the emergency room.
It is vital to get the right medications and to have your progress monitored by a primary care physician. You should have someone to call when you think your medicine isn’t working. Dr. Randall believes in a holistic, lifestyle approach, and he pays close attention to how patients can reduce their dependence on medications, whenever possible.
Chronic illnesses account for 85 percent of all health care costs. The average cost per person is $7,900. Intervention, including things like physical rehabilitation and medicines, can reduce the physical and emotional cost of disease.
One out of five adults find themselves in the emergency room each year. This means they wind up paying for the most expensive health care. If they could get good preventive care, they would spend hundreds rather than tens of thousands.
For diabetics, staying out of the hospital saves them on average $6,394 per person. This example shows that personalized care and medications can make a difference in both the quality of your life and your financial well-being.
Let’s talk more about how to prevent and/or manage chronic diseases. Call Innovative Family Health for an appointment.