The Dimensions of Multiple Chronic Conditions: Where Do We Go From Here? A Commentary on the Special Issue of Preventing Chronic Disease

The articles in this issue address the high prevalence and substantial clinical burden of multiple chronic conditions (MCC) among adults. All of these papers further the goals outlined in the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) MCC Strategic Framework (1,2). The article by Goodman, Posner, Huang, Parekh, and Koh (3) introduces the topic and describes the origin of the 20 conditions originally selected by the DHHS for emphasis. The authors also provide a conceptual model for standardizing data approaches to the analyses of MCC. The remaining articles document various distributions and rates of MCC on the national level with analyses of important federal health surveys and databases: Lochner and Cox analyzed Medicare claims data (4); Ashman and Beresovsky analyzed 1 year of the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (5); Ford, Croft, Posner, Goodman, and Giles explored the prevalence of lifestyle-related MCC from the National Health Interview Survey (6); Steiner and Friedman examined MCC-related acute care hospitalization rates from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (7); Soni and Machlin analyzed the costs of certain MCC from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (8), and Ward and Schiller estimated MCC rates from the National Health Interview Survey (9).