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Life satisfaction and frequency of doctor visits.

ABSTRACT: Identifying positive psychological factors that reduce health care use may lead to innovative efforts that help build a more sustainable and high-quality health care system. Prospective studies indicate that life satisfaction is associated with good health behaviors, enhanced health, and longer life, but little information about the association between life satisfaction and health care use is available. We tested whether higher life satisfaction was prospectively associated with fewer doctor visits. We also examined potential interactions between life satisfaction and health behaviors.Participants were 6379 adults from the Health and Retirement Study, a prospective and nationally representative panel study of American adults older than 50 years. Participants were tracked for 4 years. We analyzed the data using a generalized linear model with a gamma distribution and log link.Higher life satisfaction was associated with fewer doctor visits. On a 6-point life satisfaction scale, each unit increase in life satisfaction was associated with an 11% decrease in doctor visits--after adjusting for sociodemographic factors (relative risk = 0.89, 95% confidence interval = 0.86-0.93). The most satisfied respondents (n = 1121; 17.58%) made 44% fewer doctor visits than did the least satisfied (n = 182; 2.85%). The association between higher life satisfaction and reduced doctor visits remained even after adjusting for baseline health and a wide range of sociodemographic, psychosocial, and health-related covariates (relative risk = 0.96, 95% confidence interval = 0.93-0.99).Higher life satisfaction is associated with fewer doctor visits, which may have important implications for reducing health care costs.

SUBMITTER: Kim ES

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4608020 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Life satisfaction and frequency of doctor visits.

Kim Eric S ES Park Nansook N Sun Jennifer K JK Smith Jacqui J Peterson Christopher C

Psychosomatic medicine 20131212 1

<h4>Objective</h4>Identifying positive psychological factors that reduce health care use may lead to innovative efforts that help build a more sustainable and high-quality health care system. Prospective studies indicate that life satisfaction is associated with good health behaviors, enhanced health, and longer life, but little information about the association between life satisfaction and health care use is available. We tested whether higher life satisfaction was prospectively associated wit ...[more]

PMID: 24336427

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Project description:One-quarter of U.S. patients do not have a primary care provider or do not have complete access to one. Work and personal responsibilities also compete with finding convenient, accessible care. Telehealth services facilitate patients' access to care, but whether patients are satisfied with telehealth is unclear.We assessed patients' satisfaction with and preference for telehealth visits in a telehealth program at CVS MinuteClinics.Cross-sectional patient satisfaction survey.Patients were aged ?18 years, presented at a MinuteClinic offering telehealth in January-September 2014, had symptoms suitable for telehealth consultation, and agreed to a telehealth visit when the on-site practitioner was busy.Patients reported their age, gender, and whether they had health insurance and/or a primary care provider. Patients rated their satisfaction with seeing diagnostic images, hearing and seeing the remote practitioner, the assisting on-site nurse's capability, quality of care, convenience, and overall understanding. Patients ranked telehealth visits compared to traditional ones: better (defined as preferring telehealth), just as good (defined as liking telehealth), or worse. Predictors of preferring or liking telehealth were assessed via multivariate logistic regression.In total, 1734 (54 %) of 3303 patients completed the survey: 70 % were women, and 41 % had no usual place of care. Between 94 and 99 % reported being "very satisfied" with all telehealth attributes. One-third preferred a telehealth visit to a traditional in-person visit. An additional 57 % liked telehealth. Lack of medical insurance increased the odds of preferring telehealth (OR?=?0.83, 95 % CI, 0.72-0.97). Predictors of liking telehealth were female gender (OR?=?1.68, 1.04-2.72) and being very satisfied with their overall understanding of telehealth (OR?=?2.76, 1.84-4.15), quality of care received (OR?=?2.34, 1.42-3.87), and telehealth's convenience (OR?=?2.87, 1.09-7.94) CONCLUSIONS: Patients reported high satisfaction with their telehealth experience. Convenience and perceived quality of care were important to patients, suggesting that telehealth may facilitate access to care.

Project description:BACKGROUND:The aim of this study is to examine the joint impact of preventive health behavior (PHB) and social and demographic factors on the utilization of primary and secondary medical care under a universal health care system, as measured by visits to the doctor, who were categorized as either a General Practitioner (GP) or Specialist Doctor (SD). METHODS:An ordered probit model was utilized to analyze data obtained from the 2009 Israeli National Health Survey. The problem of endogeneity between PHB factors and visits to GP was approached using the two-stage residuals inclusion and instrumental variables method. RESULTS:We found a positive effect of PHB on visits to the doctor while the addition of the PHB factors to the independent variables resulted in important changes in explaining visits to GP (in values of the estimates, in their sign, and in their statistical significance), and only in slight changes for visits to SD. A 1% increase in PHB factors results in increasing the probability to visit General Practitioner in the last year in 0.6%. The following variables were identified as significant in explaining frequency of visits to the doctor: PHB, socio-economic status (pro-poor for visits to GP, pro-rich for visits to SD), location (for visits to SD), gender, age (age 60 or greater being a negative factor for visits to GP and a positive factor for visits to SD), chronic diseases, and marital status (being married was a negative factor for visits to GP and a positive factor for visits to SD). CONCLUSIONS:There is a need for allowing for endogeneity in examining the impact of PHB, social and demographic factors on visits to GP in a population under universal health insurance. For disadvantaged populations with low SES and those living in peripheral districts, the value of IndPrev is lower than for populations with high SES and living in the center of the country. Examining the impact of these factors, significant differences in the importance and sometimes even in the sign of their influence on visits to different categories of doctors - GP and SD, are found.

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Life satisfaction and frequency of doctor visits.

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Life satisfaction and frequency of doctor visits.

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