A small segment of Medi-Cal beneficiaries run up huge health care bills -- but they're not necessarily the people you'd expect them to be.
The so-called "super-utilizers" are one of the biggest drivers of escalating spending in California's health care system. A two-year pilot project in rural Humboldt County dealing with that population produced some surprising results.
Generally, the assumption about super-utilizers has been that they have complex health issues, multiple chronic conditions and multiple medications and they overuse the emergency department because they have no primary care provider.
The pilot project found that other issues might play a bigger role.
"When we started to home in on the top 100 utilizers from the hospital system and we built a profile of who those people were, it was really surprising to us," said Sharon Hunter, a nurse in Humboldt County who helped coordinate the Care Transitions project, a subset of a larger pilot reform effort in the county called Aligning Forces.
[For more of this story, written by David Gorn, go to http://www.californiahealthlin...dical-superutilizers]
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