HCP’s Chris Afendulis, PhD; Yulei He, PhD, Alan Zaslavsky, PhD and Mike Chernew, PhD published the article, “The Impact of Medicare Part D on Hospitalization Rates,” in Health Research and Educational Trust, which was chosen as one of two papers for the 2012 Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) outstanding Article of the Year Award. Their article examined Medicare Part D’s 2006 initiative, which increased the share of Medicare beneficiaries with prescription drug coverage from 59 to 89 percent.  Based on this new program, researchers predicted that hospitalization rates would decline with improved drug coverage.  Afendulis and his colleagues gathered information from hospital discharge data from 2005-2007 from 23 states linked with state-level data on drug coverage.  For the conditions that they studied, they found that Part D reduced the overall hospitalization rate by 20.5 per 10,000 patients. Therefore, researchers concluded that “the increase in drug coverage associated with Medicare Part D had positive effects on the health of elderly Americans, which reduced use of nondrug health care resources.” For more information about the winning article, please read the complete study.

Afendulis, He, Zaslavsky, and Chernew will be formally recognized for their publication at a poster session at the AHRQ 2012 Annual Conference on Monday, September 10th at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center.  HCP is especially proud of their accomplishment.