THE NEW YORK TIMES – Deana Hendrickson sometimes feels daunted by the demands of the medical system. “Every body part has a doctor,” she lamented. “I hate it.”
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.
At 65, providing five-day-a-week care (with her husband) for three grandsons under 5, she’s reasonably healthy and active. But her regimen “makes me feel like a sick person,” Ms. Hendrickson said.
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“I’m like an older car that always needs more maintenance. There’s so many other things I’d rather be doing.”
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.”
Doctors, she added, “underestimate the burdens and negative trade-offs of health care.”
Analyzing data from traditional Medicare for 2019, her team reported that beneficiaries over 65 averaged about 17 contact days that year for ambulatory care, which included doctors’ visits, tests and imaging, therapy and procedures — but not time spent in hospitals or nursing homes. (And not dentistry, since Medicare rarely covers it.)
“My clients are going to doctors two or three times a week” …
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