UCLA

Background

High-cost patients are a frequent focus of improvement projects based on primary care and other settings. Efforts to characterize high-cost, high-need patients are needed to inform care planning, but such efforts often rely on a priori assumptions, masking underlying complexities of a heterogenous population.

Objective

To define recognizable subgroups of patients among high-cost adults based on clinical conditions, and describe their survival and future spending.

Design

Retrospective observational cohort study.

Participants

Within a large integrated delivery system with 2.7 million adult members, we selected the top 1% of continuously enrolled adults with respect to total healthcare expenditures during 2010.

Main measures

We used latent class analysis to identify clusters of alike patients based on 53 hierarchical condition categories. Prognosis as measured by healthcare spending and survival was assessed through 2014 for the resulting classes of patients.

Results

Among 21,183 high-cost adults, seven clinically distinctive subgroups of patients emerged. Classes included end-stage renal disease (12% of high-cost population), cardiopulmonary conditions (17%), diabetes with multiple comorbidities (8%), acute illness superimposed on chronic conditions (11%), conditions requiring highly specialized care (14%), neurologic and catastrophic conditions (5%), and patients with few comorbidities (the largest class, 33%). Over 4 years of follow-up, 6566 (31%) patients died, and survival in the classes ranged from 43 to 88%. Spending regressed to the mean in all classes except the ESRD and diabetes with multiple comorbidities groups.

Conclusions

Data-driven characterization of high-cost adults yielded clinically intuitive classes that were associated with survival and reflected markedly different healthcare needs. Relatively few high-cost patients remain persistently high cost over 4 years. Our results suggest that high-cost patients, while not a monolithic group, can be segmented into few subgroups. These subgroups may be the focus of future work to understand appropriateness of care and design interventions accordingly.