Telehealth may be cost-effective for IBD patients
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For patients with inflammatory bowel disease, telehealth was cost-saving and had high probability of cost-effectiveness, according to results published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
“This self-management tool enables continuous registration of quality indicators and [patient-reported] outcomes, and might help reorganize IBD care toward value-based healthcare,” Marin J. de Jong, MD, from the Maastricht University Medical Centre, department of internal medicine, division of gastroenterology and hepatology, School for Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism, and colleagues wrote.
Researchers performed a randomized controlled trial of 909 patients with IBD from the Netherlands. They assigned patients to either telehealth with myIBDcoach (n = 465) or standard outpatient care (n = 444). Follow-up was 12 months. Investigators measured costs based on a societal perspective and based healthcare costs on resource use. Indirect costs included self-reported hours sick leave from work, intervention costs and utility costs. Researchers ued non-parametric bootstrapping method to estimate cost-utility and uncertainty.
Results showed lower mean annual costs of $612 per patient with telehealth (95% CI, $1150-2393; mean costs of $10,587 for standard care and $9,965 for telehealth) without altering quality adjusted life years. The intervention had increased incremental cost-effectiveness compared with standard care in 83% of replications and an incremental net monetary benefit of $790 per patient (95% CI, $1386-2841) at the Dutch threshold.
“Implementation of telemedicine was shown to improve health outcomes and was accompanied by a reduction of healthcare costs without a decline in quality of life. Incremental costs of telemedicine are relatively low, and the chance of telemedicine increasing costs without any health benefit is low,” de Jong and colleagues wrote. “Therefore, telemedicine may be a promising tool in restructuring IBD care toward more personalized, efficient and value-based healthcare.”
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