RESUMEN
BACKGROUND: The Acute Care Surgery (ACS) model has been widely adopted by hospitals across the United States, with ACS services managing emergency general surgery (EGS) patients previously treated by general surgery (GS) services. We evaluated the operational and financial impact of an ACS service model on general surgeons at an academic medical center. METHODS: Using WiseOR® (Palo Alto, CA), we compared surgical case volumes for the GS service two years before (October, 2013 - September, 2015) and two years after (October, 2015 - September, 2017) implementation of an ACS service at the University of Vermont Medical Center. From financial reports, we obtained monthly wRVUs, clinical FTEs, net patient revenue, and payer mix for the GS service and compared the two years before and after ACS model implementation. RESULTS: There was a significant reduction in the average number of cases performed by the GS service following ACS service implementation (monthly mean ± SD, 139.1 ± 16.0 vs. 116.7 ± 14.0, p < 0.001). The normal-hours caseload remained stable, while a significant decrease in after-hours cases accounted for the reduction in overall volume. Despite the reduction in operative volume, the decrease in mean monthly wRVU/FTE for the GS service when comparing the pre- and post- ACS periods did not reach statistical significance (614.9 ± 82.9 vs. 576.3 ± 62.1, p = 0.08).There was a significant increase in average monthly clinic-derived wRVU/FTE for the GS service (106.3 ± 13.5 vs. 120.5 ± 16.4, p = 0.007). CONCLUSIONS: Shifting EGS patient management from the GS to ACS service did not negatively impact the productivity of the GS service.
RESUMEN
In health economics, costs can be divided into both direct and indirect categories. Direct costs tend to consist of medical costs, which are those directly attributed to health care interventions (e.g., hospitalizations, pharmaceuticals, devices), and non-medical direct costs such as monitoring and professional caregiving. Indirect costs tend to comprise those related to lost productivity due to illness (or treatment), burden on systems outside of the healthcare domain, and other costs that can sometimes outweigh the entire sum of direct healthcare costs. The most common life-threatening complication of lung and hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (HSCT) is bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS). BOS is currently diagnosed as a 20% decline in the forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) from the best (baseline) post-transplantation value, and is a major cause of morbidity and mortality amongst lung and stem cell transplant patients. BOS affects half of all lung transplant patients within the first 5 years post-transplant, rising to the majority of patients (~80%) within the first decade following transplant. We estimated both direct and indirect costs for the first 10 years following BOS diagnosis, a viewpoint that highlights a tremendous imbalance between healthcare and non-healthcare costs. The lost workforce resulting from BOS-related infirmity will cost society more than $3.7 Billion over the next decade, a figure that is more than double the estimated 10-year cost of treating BOS ($1.4B), including diagnostics, immunosuppressives, and additional complications. As such, BOS is estimated to present a burden of cost that must be evaluated in a new light to include the wider societal perspective.
RESUMEN
With advances in organ matching and preventing acute graft-versus-host-disease (aGvHD), chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGvHD) following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) has become a focus of transplant-related morbidity and mortality. Given that cGvHD often presents years following a transplant, our objective was to estimate its burden of cost resulting from allogeneic HSCT based on published estimates of incidence, morbidity, the value of lost work time and survivorship. Our choice of a ten-year time horizon is novel to the field of rare disease and was determined to be meaningful after consultations with present co-authors, including five physicians, one of whom is a transplant surgeon. A total of 44 450 cGvHD patients in the United States were estimated to require treatment over the next decade (from 2015 to 2025). This estimate is based on the last 5 years of trends reported in the transplant registries. What is not reported in any registry is that these patients will accrue a total of 605 631 years of lost wages, a collective lost productivity that will cost society over $27 Billion in the decade ahead: more than five times ($27B vs. $5.2B) the estimated ten-year cost of treating the condition.