Quantification of Resource Utilization to Obtain Functional Recovery in Strokes

Abstract

Background: The increasing elderly population will turn increased attention to the functional recovery and costs for patients with cerebrovascular disease (CVD). Several functional scales like the Barthel index (BI) have been applied in healthcare research and handled as continuous variables for risk adjustment or main outcomes. BI is originally an ordinal variable and we tested whether healthcare resources during acute care settings were utilized evenly among patients with BI improvement, and whether the incremental cost to gain the given BI improvement varied, depending on the functional status at admission.