The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every part of our lives for the last two-plus years. This includes the frequency with which we received our health care. Recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic (hopefully) wanes, as more and more people are protected with vaccinations, and as society at large continued to “reopen”, patients are starting to seek medical care delayed by the pandemic.
These delays, of course, were directly and indirectly caused by the pandemic. Directly, many people avoided going to hospitals and medical facilities for fear of contracting the disease. The effects of this were immediate, as noted in a blog post written in May 2020.
Others lost jobs, and with those jobs lost medical insurance to pay for care. Finally, some patients who sought care in pandemic times had difficulty accessing it: as society shut down, things like bus routes did too.
All of this contributed to countless Americans putting off treatment, preventative care, and screenings. And these delays caused harm to patients, medical providers, and the entire health care system.
For patients, the delays could be deadly. A patient with shoulder pain and dizziness might have gone in to see his doctor for an evaluation prior to the pandemic, but instead decided to wait. When he was finally evaluated, he learned that his were symptoms of a potentially deadly heart condition, for which he had to have open heart surgery.
Other patients may have put off annual screenings for cancer, with deleterious results. One study out of Canada estimated that over 12,000 cancers went undetected in just Ontario over a six month period in 2020. Intuitively, time is critical in the treatment of cancer; as cancer goes undetected and is allowed to grow and spread, the ability for providers to successfully treat it goes down.
And, as written on this blog previously, many medical offices bore significant financial burdens due to a lack of patients to treat.
Finally, all of these delayed diagnoses add up to a significant financial burden on the health care system overall. As a general rule, more advanced disease (advanced due to delays in diagnosis) means a higher cost to treat it. By way of example, one study on breast cancer treatments found that it cost an average of $82,000 a year to treat stage I or II breast cancer patients, but the cost of treating stage IV patients was nearly $135,000.
You can read more about this here.
