Press release -
Discovery Health Tracker - April 2013
Total hospital costs for April were R1,381 million. Some of the major drivers of the high cost admissions were:
- Care for
premature infants – average cost of R809,000
-
Transplants, including kidney and pancreas, lung, heart and liver
transplants – the average costs for these transplants range from R508,000 to
R587,000
- Long term ventilation
– average cost of R661,000.
- Of the top 10
highest hospital costs paid, 7 relate to long term ventilation totalling
R15.8million (74% of Top 10 costs)
- The highest cost
was R3.6 million for a 60 year old patient that is on long term ventilation and
been admitted for more than 156 days.
Caesarean deliveries were the commonest reasons for admission (2,862), followed by digestive system diagnoses (2,842) and lens procedures (2,766). The total cost for the top 10 admission conditions amounted to R247m.
Discovery Health has over 343,386 registered chronic members and in total R1.79 billion was paid for chronic medicine over the past year. Hypertension remains the highest registered chronic condition, with 255,204 members compared to the next highest condition of hyperlipidaemia with 142,269 registered members and asthma with 82,290.
The Oncology Programme has grown in both costs and enrolled members. For April 2013, R213 million was spent on 35,180 oncology members.
Glucose testing was the number 1 Vitality screening test among members with 35,563 screenings completed, followed by cholesterol testing (27,099) and HIV testing (26,746).
For more information, please see in the April Health Tracker.Topics
Categories
Discovery information
Discovery is an authorised financial services provider.
Discovery operates in the healthcare cover market in South Africa, the United Kingdom and China; the life assurance market in South Africa and the United Kingdom; as well as the long-term savings and investment market, and short-term insurance market in South Africa.
Vitality, Discovery’s wellness programme, is the world’s largest scientific, incentive-based wellness solution. It provides individual and corporate wellness initiatives in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and China. The global Vitality membership base now exceeds 3.4 million lives.
Discovery’s core purpose is to make people healthier, and to enhance and protect their lives through financial products that clients need and want.
Discovery Health
- Launched in 1992, Discovery Health isSouth Africa’s largest healthcare funder and manager of medical schemes. It manages 14 medical schemes.
- This includes the Discovery Health Medical Scheme, which has a 50% share in the open medical schemes market, making it South Africa’s largest open medical scheme.
- Discovery Health covers more than 2.6 million lives.
- The Scheme is the only one in South Africa to enjoy an AA+ rating for its claims paying ability, the highest possible credit rating from international rating agency Global Credit Ratings.
- The Discovery Health Medical Scheme holds over R7.4 billion in reserves.
- Discovery Health pioneered consumer-driven healthcare in South Africa with the introduction of innovations like the Medical Savings Account and its wellness programme, Vitality.
- Discovery Health is continuously innovating new products and tools to enhance the quality of care members receive, including HealthID, an iPad-based application for doctors launched in 2012.
- Discovery Health was voted the top medical aid brand in the Sunday Times Top Brands survey for both 2010 and 2011.
- Discovery Health was voted the top healthcare product supplier at the 2010, 2011 and 2012 Financial Intermediaries Association of Southern Africa (FIA) Awards.
- In 2012, the PricewaterhouseCoopers fifth biennial Strategic and Emerging Issues in South African Insurance survey rated Discovery Health’s insurance products as the leader in the industry.
