A Consumer Reports article in the July 2008 issue of the publication examines the intensity of hospital care:

Though the idea that more health care is better seems to make sense, recent research has shown that none of the above necessarily helps you live better or longer. In fact, too much medical care might shorten your life.

Those findings grew out of the 2008 Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care study and almost three decades of research by John E. Wennberg, M.D., and colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School. Their study of 4,732,448 Medicare patients at thousands of hospitals in the U.S. from 2001 through 2005 found significant variations in the way that people with serious illnesses such as heart failure and cancer were treated during the last two years of their lives. Some regions used two or three times the medical and financial resources than others.

The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care offers tools to benchmark and compare treatment, data and the complete report: Tracking the Care of Patients with Severe Chronic Illness: The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care 2008.


Sources: Consumer Reports, Dartmouth.