Morbidity and Mortality

• Lack of timeliness can result in emotional distress, physical harm, and financial consequences for patients³.
• Early intervention, whether with percutaneous coronary stenting or thrombolytic therapy, is regarded as the best chance for protecting heart muscle damage in patients suffering heart attacks⁴.
• Stroke patients' mortality and long-term disability are largely influenced by the timeliness of therapy^{5, 6}.
• Timely delivery of appropriate care can help reduce mortality and morbidity for both acute conditions such as heart attacks and chronic conditions such as chronic kidney disease^7-9.

Cost

• Early care for comorbid conditions such as depression has been shown to reduce hospitalization rates and costs for Medicare beneficiaries¹⁰.
• Early care for complications in patients with diabetes can reduce overall costs of the disease. ¹¹ Some research suggests that complications can amount to nearly $50,000 per patient over 30 years.¹²
• Timely outpatient care can reduce admissions for pediatric asthma, which account for $835 million in total hospitalization charges annually^{13, 14}.

Measures

This report focuses on two of the nine measures in the timeliness measure set:

• Time to initiation of thrombolytic therapy for heart attack patientsⁱ
• Patient's perceptions of the timeliness of appointments for routine care and illness care

ⁱ These measures are described in the Heart Disease section of Chapter 2.