Checking in, saving lives
Saving thousands of lives and reducing health care costs might be a matter of just picking up the phone. Harvard researchers have estimated the likely cost-effectiveness of post-discharge follow-up phone calls to smokers hospitalized with acute heart attacks. In a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the researchers suggest that phone calls to these discharged smokers encouraging them to quit would yield significant health and economic gains. “It’s an extremely simply intervention, just some phone calls that make a big impact,” says Harvard’s Joseph Ladapo, a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School who is completing an internal medicine residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In their analysis, Ladapo and his colleagues considered the likely health and economic benefits gained when nurses phone survivors of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) five times over three months to encourage them to quit smoking. “This is actually an enormous public heath care problem,” says Lapado of the...