Improving outcomes in hip fracture patients: are care pathways the answer?
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to I G Naglie.
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Cost-effectiveness analysis can be used to help set priorities for funding health care programs. For each intervention, the costs and clinical outcomes associated with that strategy must be compared with an alternate strategy for treating the same patients. If an intervention results in improved outcomes but also costs more, the incremental cost per incremental unit of clinical outcome should be calculated. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratios for various programs can be ranked to set funding priorities. By using this list, the person responsible for allocating resources can maximize the net health benefit for a target population derived from a fixed budget. Clinicians may not share this objective because, individually, they are appropriately concerned solely with the effectiveness of a specific intervention for their patients and are not concerned with the benefit derived from spending those resources on other patients in the target population. In addition, allocation may be driven by distributional and political objectives. Nevertheless, cost-effectiveness analysis demonstrates the consequences of allocation decisions. Because clinicians should participate in policy making, they must understand d the role of this technique in setting funding priorities.
The objective of the study was to determine the preferred treatment strategy for elderly patients with chronic nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (CNVAF). A Markov decision-analytic model was used to compare three treatment strategies for CNVAF: 1) warfarin; 2) aspirin; and 3) no treatment. Five-year quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) were calculated for male and female cohorts aged 70 and 75 years. In the baseline analysis (effectiveness of warfarin = 0.70, effectiveness of aspirin = 0.45, utility of warfarin = 0.99, and utility of aspirin = 0.999) the quality-adjusted survival rates for 70-year-old males were 4.03 QALYs on warfarin, 4.02 QALYs on aspirin, and 3.95 QALYs on no treatment. Results were similar for all age and sex cohorts. Sensitivity analyses revealed that the results were very sensitive to the effectiveness of aspirin and the disutility of warfarin. The authors conclude that the optimal strategy for the treatment of CNVAF in elderly patients varies with the disutility assigned to warfarin therapy and the effectiveness value for aspirin therapy.
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