Cataract surgery is the most common elective outpatient procedure performed on older adults, but is the cost of this surgery unnecessarily inflated because of needless pre-operative testing? According to a new study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, in most cases, the answer is yes.
Sadly, many older Americans who are on Medicare and a fixed income are paying co-insurance for the excessive testing because they don’t know they can opt out of it by simply asking their doctor if it is absolutely necessary.
“This is one of the lowest-risk surgery procedures you can have,” says Catherine Lee Chen, an anesthesiologist at the University of California at San Francisco and the lead author of the study.
Despite the low-risk of the 18-minute eye surgery, many eye doctors still order a costly battery of pre-operative tests, which are designed to assess whether a patient is healthy enough to have their cataracts removed. In 2002, several medical groups advised doctors against ordering the needless tests, but the study found the practice is still very common.
To help determine if the testing had any benefit to patients, researchers evaluated the Medicare records of 440,000 patients who had their cataracts removed in 2011. The study found that 53 percent of those patients had as many as five pre-op tests performed the month before their procedure. However, the only factor that seemed to determine whether the tests were ordered was the doctor doing the procedure not the overall health of the patient.
Ellen Meara, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, said the study's findings suggest that cataracts patients may need to get more involved and question their doctor before agreeing to unnecessary testing.
To learn more about the study, read the entire article.
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