Estimation Of Direct And Indirect Costs Associated With Asthma And Copd: A Canadian Employers Perspective

Abstract

comparison cohort (patients without a COPD diagnosis) was created for patients of the same age, gender, race, index year, and baseline Charlson Comorbidity Index score as patients in the COPD cohort. To reduce selection bias, a random index date was chosen for the comparison cohort. Patients were required to have continuous medical and pharmacy benefits 1 year pre-and post-index date. One-to-one propensity score matching (PSM) was performed to compare follow-up health care costs and utilization between the cohorts, adjusting for demographic and clinical characteristics. Results: Eligible patients (N= 925,970) were identified for the COPD and comparison cohorts. After 1:1 PSM, a total of 308,089 patients were matched from each cohort and baseline characteristics were well-balanced. COPD patients had a higher percentage of health care resource utilization, including inpatient visits (12.04% vs. 2.83%, p< 0.0001); outpatient visits (99.72% vs. 77.43%, p< 0.0001); and pharmacy visits (91.35% vs. 68.37%, p< 0.0001) than non-COPD patients. Higher health care resource utilization translated to higher costs for COPD patients, including inpatient

Evaluation of the economic and social burden of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

“…The trend observed in our study about a positive correlation between the amount of indirect costs and severity of COPD is in agreement with that reported by Wacker et al [28] ranging from 8621 to 27,658€ according to severity [26,28]. A study performed from the perspective of the employers in Canada presents a significant percent of indirect costs (51%) and shows that the higher the severity, the higher the indirect costs per patient: $1079 (mild), $1554 (moderate) and $2198 (severe and very severe) [29], which was supported by our observations.…”