Care Coordination of Medicare Patients Needed to Reduce Adverse Medical Events

​About one in five older adults is at risk of one or more adverse medical events, or medical injuries, that are the result of care management complications rather than any underlying disease, finds a study published online May 28, 2014, in the journal Injury Prevention. Nearly two-thirds of the injuries occurred when patients were receiving outpatient care. The authors evaluated a sample of 12,541 Medicare patients treated from 1998 to 2004 and found that 19% of the patients experienced at least one adverse medical event; 62% of the events were identified from outpatient claims. Only 55% of patients who sustained an adverse medical event survived to the end of the study compared with nearly 80% of those who did not sustain any medical injuries.