“Deana Hendrickson sometimes feels daunted by the demands of the medical system. ‘Every body part has a doctor,’ she lamented. ‘I hate it,’” Paula Span writes over at The New York Times. “Ms. Hendrickson reeled off a long list of her health care providers: a primary care doctor; a cardiologist, because she has mild heart disease and a concerning family history; a lung surgeon and a pulmonologist who oversee an annual scan because of her family history of lung cancer. Plus an ophthalmologist, a gynecologist, a urologist, a podiatrist, a gastroenterologist — ‘and I just came back from the dentist.’ She estimates that with scans, imaging and tests, she spends two dozen days a year engaged with some sort of provider. Most of them, she added, practice in Santa Monica, Calif., where she used to live, now an hour’s drive from her home. Researchers call such encounters ‘health care contact days,’ and they are starting to quantify their toll on older adults. ‘More people are thinking about time and health care,’ said Dr. Ishani Ganguli, a physician and researcher at Harvard Medical School. ‘It identifies a key way we ask a lot of patients.’ … Analyzing data from traditional Medicare for 2019, her team reported that beneficiaries over 65 averaged about 17 contact days that year for ambulatory care. … Among those with 10 or more chronic conditions — an eye-opening 14 percent of the total — contact days for ambulatory care rose to 30 a year. Eleven percent of patients clocked 50 such days or more.” Paula Span, “So Many Days Lost at the Doctor’s Office,” The New York Times.
