ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 6 (UPI) -- Specialty heart hospitals perform twice as many heart procedures as general hospitals with cardiac units, say U.S. government researchers.
The federal government halted the opening of new heart hospitals in 2003 out of concern that procedures were ordered for financial and not medical reasons and specialty hospitals attracted paying patients, leaving sicker and uninsured patients to other facilities.
And new research suggests that may be the case. Brahmajee Nallamothu led a multi-center study funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that looked at the effect of specialty heart hospitals on patterns of cardiac care.
The team used Medicare data from 1995 to 2003 on beneficiaries age 65 and older and focused on 13 regions where one or more specialty cardiac hospitals opened during the study period.
They found that the use of less invasive procedures rose steadily in the United States during the study period and many general hospitals began to offer them for the first time, but in regions with specialty heart hospitals the number of such procedures more than doubled.
In addition, the number of procedures done on a "non-emergent" basis -- when no heart attack had occurred -- almost doubled, and more bypass surgeries were performed as well.
The federal ban on new heart hospitals was lifted in 2006 after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services adjusted Medicare payments to limit financial incentives and required physicians to disclose their financial interests to their patients.
The study appears in the March 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
