Home Health & Hospice Week

You're not alone if osteoporosis patients are taking up a bigger portion of your patient census.

Osteoporosis continues to take its toll on Americans, according to a new government study. The hospitalization rate of patients admitted for hip, pelvis, and other fracture treatments associated with the bone disease increased by 55 percent between 1995 and 2006, according to the latest News and Numbers from the HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

HHA link: Home care providers serving patients who come out of the hospital are seeing a higher proportion of osteoporosis patients too, observers report. That means longer treatment times and patients with an increased likelihood of broken bones despite your best efforts.

An estimated 10 million Americans suffer from osteoporosis, which causes bones to become brittle and weak. Fractures associated with osteoporosis can be slow to heal, and they also can cause debilitating pain, disability, deformities, and occasionally death.

AHRQ's study also found that fractures associated with osteoporosis:

• accounted for one-fourth of the roughly 1 million hospitalizations in 2006 of patients with osteoporosis;

• cost hospitals $2.4 billion in 2006;

• caused women to be six times more likely to be hospitalized than men;

• involved mostly older patients: 90 percent of hospitalizations were for those age 65 and older, and 37 percent for patients age 85 and older; and

• were highest in the Midwest (107 per 100,000 people) and lowest in the West (68 per 100,000 people).