A Brown University research team that has been studying the impact of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care’s withdrawal from the Rhode Island market plans to present its findings to the New England Journal of Medicine.
According to the Brown University News Service, researchers want to submit the findings to the prestigious journal as a case study because it offers an unusual glimpse of a little-studied phenomenon: the closure of an insolvent health plan. Researchers won’t release the study’s results until after they’ve found out if the journal will publish the case study, the news service said.
The research team began the study in November 2000, nearly one year after bankruptcy shut down the Rhode Island subsidiary of Boston-based Harvard Pilgrim. The health plan’s closure in December 1999 left nearly 130,000 Rhode Islanders scrambling to find new health coverage – and new doctors in many cases.
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The recently completed study is an effort to gauge the impact of the plan’s closing on patients and physicians in the state.
“We want to determine how the remaining health-care system in Rhode Island absorbed these patients since the closure,” researcher Linda Laliberte said at the start of the study. Laliberte is one of the study’s lead investigators and an associate director of Brown’s Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research.
Researchers had said they were particularly interested in finding out what happened to people with chronic health conditions who had been seeing the same physician for long periods of time. They noted at the time that Rhode Island’s small size would allow for a comprehensive assessment of the statewide impact of the insurer’s withdrawal.
In January of last year, researchers began a telephone survey of 1,200 former Harvard Pilgrim Patients, along with a mail survey of 500 physicians who were part of the Harvard Pilgrim provider network. The patients population was split into three groups: one-third had chronic health conditions, one-third were Medicaid recipients and a third were from the health plan’s general population.
The patient portion of the survey covered the effects of lapses in insurance coverage, disruptions in care, canceled procedures and changes in premiums, co-payments, benefits and primary-care physicians and specialists.
The physician survey attempted to explore several issues connected to Harvard Pilgrim’s closure: financial losses from unpaid claims, relocation of practices out of state, physician contracts with other health plans and retirement from practice.
The study was funded by a $177,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
A spokeswoman at the New England Journal of Medicine said the publication’s editors typically decide whether to publish a study within six weeks of a submission. If editors are interested, the submission would be sent out for two external reviews by doctors in the journal’s database.
