Health care costs of heart failure: results from a randomised study of patient education

Autor: Bo Israelsson, S. Jendteg, Hans Liedholm, A. Björck Linné
Rok vydání: 2000
Předmět:
Zdroj: European journal of heart failure. 2(3)
ISSN: 1388-9842
Popis: Background: Heart failure is a serious syndrome with a bad prognosis. Hospitalisation is common and readmittance rate is high; factors which influence the cost of care and treatment. Only scarce data on detailed patient materials regarding health care costs are known. Aims: To describe in detail the health care costs for heart failure patients. Methods: Costs for patients (n = 108) who completed a randomised education trial were studied for 6 months after hospital discharge. Costs for hospital stay, out-patient visits, diagnostic tests and procedures, laboratory analyses and drug treatment were calculated. Official unit prices list used to reimburse providers of cross-boundary health services and prices for drugs in the Swedish Drug Compendium were employed. Results The total cost for a heart failure patient was approximately 20000 SEK (2564 US$, 7.80 SEK = 1 US$) for 6 months. There was a 27-fold variation between patients. There was no relation between age or sex and cost. In decreasing order cost for hospitalisation was followed by costs for out-patient visits, diagnostic tests and procedures, laboratory analyses and drugs. Conclusion: Hospitalisation was the largest part of the total cost and there was a large inter-individual variation. Efforts to reduce the economic burden should be focused on hospitalisation. Due to skewed distribution, individual data must be considered in the analysis of the efforts.
Databáze: OpenAIRE