The aim of this study was to analyze ambulatory medical care utilization by patients aged 65 and over in relation to chronic diseases and multimorbidity in Germany. We found a high rate of utilization of ambulatory medical care services by the elderly. Being multimorbid corresponded to more than the double of contacts compared to the non-multimorbid sample. On average, multimorbid elderly persons had 36 contacts with physician practices per year. Some 20% of the multimorbid elderly had one contact with a physician practice every week. In general, both age differences among the elderly and sex had at best a small influence on the number of contacts with physicians and the number of contacted medical professionals in the mm-sample. The number of contacts per year varied largely according to individual chronic conditions and to their combinations in the multimorbidity patterns. Chronic conditions leading to nursing dependency was the most important factor related to high utilization rates.
It is customary to pretend an almost inevitable increase of utilization of medical services due to the growing number of elderly people in the population worldwide. In our study, however, the bivariate analysis showed only a very moderate increase in the number of contacts (15%) between the youngest and the oldest age group in the mm-sample, and this effect disappeared when controlled for other factors. The number of physicians contacted even decreased among the oldest old, especially in females. These results contradict the thesis on the association of growing old and increasing use of medical services. Multiple reasons may explain this non-association. It may be that people become older without a parallel increase of the number of chronic diseases and/or of disease burden and/or complications, e.g. due to earlier diagnosis, success of treatment and/or secondary prevention. This hypothesis is known as compression of morbidity, a thesis still under discussion [24]. There is still no scientific proof that an increasing longevity is associated with a shortened period of morbidity and/or disability, but many studies point in this direction [25]. In our study, the difference in the number of chronic conditions between the youngest and the oldest age group was only 1, although the difference in average age between the youngest and the oldest age group was 17 years [23]. The demand for services by the elderly also depends on the social setting (socially integrated or living alone) or the living conditions of the patients (in the community or in the nursing home). Also, explicit rationing and/or silent age discrimination by professionals might contribute to the cessation of the increase of utilization in the oldest old. On the other hand, the absence of an age-related increase in utilization may also be due to the one-year time span of this study, since frequent utilizers may die at an earlier age. Here, analyses of utilization covering several years are needed. As for research on utilization by patients and for care supply planning, the potential survival phenomenon described above is irrelevant as the object of health services research is the real population under actual care conditions.
In contrast to many studies [12, 13, 26, 27], we also did not find clear-cut signs of higher utilization patterns in the multimorbid female elderly compared to men. In the bivariate analysis, the difference in visit numbers was small for all age groups, whereas the number of different physicians contacted was higher for multimorbid women in the younger age groups but lower in the older groups. Our data suggest that the number of specialists seen by multimorbid patients decreases with age in female, but not in male patients, except for the oldest old. Of course, a study covering a 12 months time span cannot definitively prove the asserted non-associations, for which reason observations over several years will follow. The small effect of gender was confirmed in the regression analysis.
The positive association between the number of chronic conditions and the two utilization indicators in this study was not linear. Instead, both indicators showed the relatively largest increase from 0 to 1 chronic condition. In other words, the increase in utilization started already with the appearance of the first chronic condition and grows relatively consistently with every further number. The number of chronic conditions had a great influence on utilization in bivariate analyses, but its effect also became unspectacular when controlling for other factors as every additional chronic condition increased the number of contacts by 2.3 per year only. The only really important factor for high utilization was ADL-related disability, as expressed by the reception of services from the statutory nursing insurance system. Nursing dependency led to a small decrease in the number of physicians contacted but to 10 more visits to physicians per year. This association underscores the idea that primary and/or secondary prevention of disability might lead to a reduction of the utilization of ambulatory medical services.
The increase in utilization of ambulatory medical care due to chronic diseases and mutlimorbidity found in this study confirms the results of many other studies. In a comprehensive review of the literature by Gijsen et al., the authors concluded that "comorbidity was consistently related to health care utilization (costs, length of hospital stay, and number of physician visits)" [28]. Also, the German Robert-Koch-Institute study based on survey methods found a doubling of the number of physician contacts in ambulatory care within the multimorbid population under 75 years in Germany [11].
The number of contacts and of contacted physicians also varied with the presence of individual chronic conditions and of their (triadic) combinations in the multimorbidity patterns of the patients. The number of contacts varied between 35 and 54 per year and the number of contacted physicians between 5 and 7 depending on the presence of individual chronic conditions. Similar variances are also found for patterns which included the 50 most frequent triadic combinations (maximum 48 and minimum 36 contacts). Further research is needed to explain these variances. At first glance, the number of contacts is not related to the question if the diagnoses are related to one or several specialist disciplines ("morbidity mix"). Neither is there an obvious association between the number of contacts and the number of contacted physicians. In any case, the data suggest that the utilization figures are independent of the prevalence of the chronic conditions and their combinations.
With an average of 36/year, the number of contacts of multimorbid elderly with physicians in ambulatory care is likely to be far greater in Germany than in the health care systems of other countries. In the Netherlands, the number of contacts per year with physicians in ambulatory care is around 11 in patients with chronic disease(s), 5 of them with specialists [29]. Nie et al. reported 10 visits to ambulatory care physicians in Ontario in 2005/06 [6]. For the United States of America, Starfield reported 15.5 visits (6.6 visits to the PCP and 9.0 visits to specialists) in the sample with the highest multimorbidity burden in a Medicare sample aged 65 years and older in 1999 [30]. Also, the average number of contacted specialists (estimated 4,7 for Germany) and the proportion of the multimorbid population referred to specialists (93%) is obviously higher than in other countries. Forrest et al. found that 14% of the population in the United Kingdom and 30 to 37% in managed care plans in the United States of America were referred to specialists in 2002 [31]. The percentage of elderly with at least one chronic condition referred to at least one specialist was 80% in the Netherlands in 2004 [29]. Nie found 3 visits to specialists per year for the elderly in Ontario, Canada [6]. Regardless of the comparison problems of health systems in general and the definition of contact or visit in particular as described in the methods section, Germany seems to be leading country in the world with regard to the proportion of people referred to specialists, the number of different specialists visited and the number of contacts with both PCPs and specialists per year. Further research is needed to explain these exceptional features of the German ambulatory health care system. Apart from patient-based utilization habits, the contribution of morbidity-independent bureaucratic regulations in the insurance system (e.g. prescription regulations, budget limits, co-payment rules etc.) deserve more attention with regard to their effects on utilization. Like in the United States of America, specialists in Germany play an important role in caring for common conditions, not particularly when the level of comorbidity is high or the individual chronic condition warrants highly specialized care [30, 32]. As many consultations of specialists end with recommendations for further diagnostics and/or drug prescriptions, problems of guidance, documentation, coordination and cooperation between professionals arise, for which tools and routines are largely lacking.
Our study has weaknesses but also strengths. As this study is based on claims data, diagnoses were not clinically verified by professionals specially trained for this study. Erroneous and transitory diagnoses were minimized by monitoring the persons over a whole year, only acknowledging a condition as chronic if a ICD code from the 46er list was found in at least three quarters of the year. Privately insured patients (some 10% of the population) were not included in this study. The claims data do not allow the analysis of other important aspects of utilization, such as subjective utilization needs, disease severity or socio-economic characteristics of patients. On the other hand, insurance claims data do allow the analysis of large populations over long periods of time, including those living in protected institutions and in nursing homes and those of frail individuals as well as of the oldest of the elderly, all of whom are frequently excluded from field studies. The same applies to the lack of selection bias with regard to the service providers, an even greater problem in field research. Also, recall bias and social desirability problems in interviews concerning the utilization of services are excluded.
In this study we only examined the utilization of ambulatory physician services but we intend to expand this analysis to hospital utilization, physiotherapy services, and pharmaceutical use in order to obtain a complete picture on utilization and cost of medical care for the elderly in Germany.