Nature Scientific Reports publishes an article in its latest issue on the predictive factors for clinical outcomes and costs. The research group, which includes members from Amsterdam UMC, the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management, and LOGEX Healthcare Analytics, concluded after extensive data analysis that prior hospitalisation is a very important predictor of treatment outcome – even more so than patient characteristics such as age, gender, and comorbidity.
The study was done for four different treatments: colorectal cancer, bladder cancer, acute angioplasty and knee operations. The analysis revealed that the readmission risk (and thus the total cost of care) is significantly higher in patients who have been hospitalised before. This information can be used to monitor specific patient groups after surgery in order to prevent possible complications and reduce overall healthcare costs.
LOGEX helped set up the study and carry out the analysis. This focused on data on mortality, readmission, length of stay and healthcare costs for four common treatments studied. The data used came from the LOGEX benchmark database based on DBC data.
Vincent Stangenberger, who was part of the research team on behalf of LOGEX, talks about the potential impact of the study:
“The research has yielded very pragmatic insights. The next step is to investigate how DBC data can enrich existing clinical registrations. By reusing the already available data for this purpose, the registrations become more valuable without increasing the registration burden.”
Read the full article in Nature Scientific Reports here.