The International Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health (ICIMH), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA <i>May 17–20, 2016</i>

Abstract

Purpose: Escalating health care (HC) expenditures highlight the need to identify low cost interventions that hold promise for lowering health care costs-especially for chronic illness including cardiovascular disease. Lifestyle interventions offer the hope of sustained health behavior change. The study reported here extends an initial study of two active lifestyle interventions-mindfulness and diet/exercise-with enrollees in the university's health plan. In the initial study health improvements (lower CRP scores) occurred in both interventions. Methods: The current study compares changes in HC utilization among participants in the mindfulness intervention (n = 84), the diet/exercise intervention (n = 86) and a retrospectively matched control group (n = 258). The control group was matched on previous 9 month prior HC expenditure, age, gender, and health relative risk score to the intervention groups, and did not undergo one of the two active lifestyle interventions from the previous study. In the current study, HC measures include primary care visits, pharmacy costs (including number and cost of scripts), number of hospital admissions, and overall HC costs tracked for 5 years after the initial study. Results: Results included significantly fewer primary care visits (p < .05) and hospital admits (p < .05) for the intervention groups as compared to matched controls, with a non-significant trend towards less overall HC utilization (average of 4000.00 actual dollar differences) for the intervention groups as compared to controls 5 years post the original study. Pharmacy costs and number of scripts were significantly higher for the 2 intervention groups compared to controls over the 5 years (p < .05), yet still resulted in less HC utilization costs, potentially indicating greater self-management of care.