NEW ORLEANS – Obesity has been formally diagnosed in less than half of patients with a body-mass index of 30 kg/m2 or higher in the Cleveland Clinic’s large multispecialty database, and Bartolome Burguera, MD, believes it’s the same story elsewhere.
“I think pretty much all over the country obesity is really not well diagnosed,” Dr. Burguera, director of obesity programs at the Cleveland Clinic, said at Obesity Week 2016.
And that which hasn’t been diagnosed doesn’t get treated.
Dr. Bartolome Burguera
The diagnosis rate went up with higher BMIs; still, of the 25,137 patients with obesity class 3 as defined by a BMI of 40 kg/m2 or higher, only 75% had a formal diagnosis of obesity in their record, the endocrinologist said at the meeting presented by the Obesity Society and the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery.
“For many years, physicians thought that obesity is not a disease. And even though it was considered a disease by some, they didn’t feel they had the tools, the knowledge, the support, the medications, or the time to take care of obesity, especially when they thought of it as a self-inflicted disease,” Dr. Burguera explained in an interview. He believes physician attitudes are slowly changing.
“In our clinic we’ve taken measures to change attitudes, for sure. Now, when we look in the electronic health record we get an automatic alert if the patient has a BMI of 30 or more,” he said.
“I think, in general, many more people now think of obesity as a disease. But it’s a chronic disease and you have to have chronic therapy. We have to make sure we make the diagnosis, and once you make the diagnosis you have to discuss treatment with the patient. If you don’t feel comfortable for whatever reason, I think you have to refer the patient to a colleague to take care of the obesity. Because when you take care of the obesity all the comorbidities get better: the diabetes, the blood pressure, the cholesterol. Obesity is the primary problem in so many other comorbidities. We have put little effort to this point in taking care of the obesity. We’ve put more effort into treating the diabetes and the other comorbidities,” Dr. Burguera said.
Bruce Jancin/Frontline Medical News
Dr. John A. Batsis
The Medicare obesity benefit provides reimbursement in primary care settings for intensive behavioral therapy with face-to-face counseling and motivational interviewing. The billing code is G0447. Coverage is provided for 22 visits over the course of a year, each lasting 15 minutes.
Dr. Batsis presented highlights of his published serial cross-sectional analysis of fee-for-service Medicare claims data for 2012 and 2013. Among Medicare beneficiaries eligible for the obesity benefit because they had a BMI of 30 kg/m2 or above, only 0.35% used the benefit in 2012. There was a tiny uptick to 0.6% in 2013, but even in the tiny fraction of eligible patients who availed themselves of the benefit, the average number of behavioral therapy sessions was just 2.1 visits out of the 22 for which physician reimbursement is available (Obesity. 2016 Sep;24[9]:1983-8).
“Let’s hope the 2014 data look a little better,” commented Dr. Batsis of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in Lebanon, N.H.
There was marked regional variation in utilization of the Medicare obesity benefit across the U.S. in 2013. Rates were highest in Colorado – the state with the lowest obesity rate in the country – as well as Nebraska, Wisconsin, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Rates were lowest across the Southwest.
Dr. Burguera’s study was funded by Novo Nordisk. Dr. Batsis reported having no financial conflicts of interest.