Medicare Annual Wellness Visits Not Associated with Changes in Care

Nurse and doctor standing in hallway looking at clipboard

In 2011, Medicare introduced annual wellness visits as part of the Affordable Care Act. The fraction of Medicare enrollees who used such a visit has steadily to 18.8% in 2015. The hope is that these visits would increase utilization of preventative care, improve chronic disease management, and reduce emergency department (ED) visits and hospitalizations. Did they do so?

Using Medicare data, Ishani Ganguli, Jeffrey Souza, J. Michael McWilliams, and  Ateev Mehrotra studied this question and found that the use of these visits by certain practices was not associated with any substantive changes in ED visits, hospitalizations, or preventive care. The results were recently reported in HealthAffairs.

The changes in care that were seen were overall very modest. There was a slight increase in cancer screenings as well as referrals for physical and occupational therapies. ED visits saw a slight decrease while hospitalization rates were unchanged. The authors conclude that their findings are largely consistent with other research demonstrating that expanding access to preventive care does not necessarily reduce health care use overall.  They further suggest more study of the use of AWVs to achieve their intended objective of increasing rates of preventive care for high-need patients.