Identifying Approaches to Measure and Reduce Harmful, Low-Value Care Among Older Americans with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Dementia

ABSTRACT Low-value care is patient care that provides no net benefit in specific clinical scenarios, and often causes harm. Older adults with mild cognitive impairment and dementia (MCID) frequently receive low-value care and are particularly vulnerable to its harms (e.g., routine benzodiazepine drug prescriptions offer limited benefit to adults with MCID and can cause delirium or falls). Reducing the delivery of low-value care can improve health outcomes for this vulnerable group by lessening exposure to harms as well as curtailing unnecessary spending. To begin to reduce the problem of low-value care delivery in older adults with MCID, it is important to understand the extent of the national problem, identify the characteristics of patients and the delivery systems with the greatest risk exposure, and whether two currently implemented U.S. strategies (payment reform and a large education campaign) were associated with less delivery of low-value care among older adults with MCID. In this context, we propose three specific aims: 1) to generate national estimates of low-value care trends, costs, and harms in older adults with MCID (2008–2018), 2) to identify subgroups of older adults with MCID at the greatest risk of receiving low-value care, and 3) to assess whether two U.S. strategies were associated with less low-value care delivered to older adults with MCID. We propose to achieve these aims by linking Medicare claims data with the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which is a nationally representative longitudinal study of community-dwelling and institutionalized older Americans on the health and economic changes of aging. We will pursue these aims using national longitudinal data and by applying rigorous analytical approaches such as interrupted time series methods with contemporaneous control groups. Ultimately, we seek to build a foundation of evidence to inform future U.S. health policies that can reduce low-value care and improve patient-oriented outcomes in older Americans with MCID.