In a well-publicized snapshot of the challenge of ICU triage, Chang and colleagues wrote:
Critical care services can be life-saving, but many patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) are too sick or, conversely, not sick enough to benefit. Intensive care unit overutilization can produce more costly and invasive care without improving outcomes.
Emphasis added. Hyder provides an interesting critique to which Chang and Shapiro respond. In this post, I shall consider over-utilization by those “not sick enough to benefit”: 23.4% of the 808 patients admitted to the UCLA Medical Center in the study by Chang et al. This over-utilization provides both a challenge and a win-win opportunity (better outcomes at lower cost) if we can meet the challenge.
In a forward-looking vision, which some may regard as optimistic, Anesi et al wrote:
In the year 2050 we will unambiguously reimburse healthcare based on value, and so there is good reason to suspect that we will have targeted and reduced many services that provide little or no benefit to patients…
It can be argued that ICU over-utilization, on average, provides no overall benefit, while significantly increasing costs. Gooch and Kahn observed that US spending on critical care represents nearly 3% of GDP, while:
In contrast, the United Kingdom spends only 0.1% of its gross domestic product on critical care services, with no evidence of worse patient outcomes and similar life expectancies as in the United States. Although there are many differences between these 2 countries, one significant difference is intensive care unit (ICU) bed supply. The United States has 25 ICU beds per 100 000 people, as compared with 5 per 100 000 in the United Kingdom. As a result, ICU case-mix differs substantially. In the United Kingdom, the majority of ICU patients are at high risk for death, whereas in the United States, many patients are admitted to the ICU for observation.
As observed by Halpern, these differences come at a significant cost in the US:
The number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in the United States has continued to increase over the last 3 decades, as have ICU utilization rates and costs, and this despite the lack of any federal, regional, or critical care society mandates to justify these increases. Some experts believe that the increase in the number of ICU beds has led to inappropriate use of these beds by patients who are either too healthy or too sick to benefit from intensive care. This may in part explain the stable national ICU occupancy rate of approximately 68% between 1985 and 2010 and suggests that ICU utilization has simply risen to meet the increased number of beds.
Emphasis added. I shall consider here only ICU usage by patients too healthy to benefit. Although the economics behind reducing ICU over-utilization by “those not sick enough to benefit” appears simple, the underlying cause is in fact likely complex.
This one appears easy: lower costs and potentially better outcomes
At the same time, I recall several caveats, well known to health economists, but important in planning and communication:
- We expect ICUs to be available when needed, including for emergencies and disasters,
- ICUs have high fixed costs,
- Decision-making is critical: incremental costs of adding capacity become fixed costs in the future.
Chris Sampson recently reviewed a study aimed at overconsumption or misconsumption (a consequence of over-utilization). The authors of that paper suggest that “cultural change might be required to achieve significant shifts in clinical behaviour.” Chris laments that this study did not ‘dig deeper’; here we aim to dig deeper in one specific area: ICU triage for patients “not sick enough to benefit.” More questions than answers at this stage, but hopefully the questions will ultimately lead to answers.
I begin by stepping back: economic decisions frequently involve compromises in allocating scarce resources. Decisions in health economics are frequently no different. How scarce are ICU resources? What happens if they are less scarce? What are the costs? Increasing availability can frequently lead to increased utilization, a phenomenon called “demand elasticity”. For example, increasing expressway/motorway capacity “can lead to increased traffic as new drivers seize the opportunity to travel on the larger road”, and thus no reduction in travel time. Gooch and Kahn further note that:
The presence of demand elasticity in decisions regarding ICU care has major implications for health care delivery and financing. Primarily, this indicates it is possible to reduce the costs of US hospital care by constraining ICU bed supply, perhaps through certificate of need laws or other legislation.
I offer a highly simplified sketch of how ICU over-utilization by those “not sick enough to benefit” is one driver of a vicious cycle in ICU cost growth.
ICU over-utilization by patients “not sick enough to benefit” as a driver for ICU demand elasticity
Who (if anyone) is at fault for this ICU vicious cycle? Chang and Shapiro offer one suggestion:
For medical conditions where ICU care is frequently provided, but may not always be necessary, institutions that utilize ICUs more frequently are more likely to perform invasive procedures and have higher costs but have no improvement in hospital mortality. Hospitals had similar ICU utilization patterns across the 4 medical conditions, suggesting that systematic institutional factors may influence decisions to potentially overutilize ICU care.
Emphasis added. I note that demand elasticity is not in itself bad; it must simply be recognized, controlled and used appropriately. As part of a discussion in print on the role of cost considerations in medical decisions, Du and Kahn write:
Although we argue that costs should not be factored into medical decision-making in the ICU, this does not mean that we should not strive toward healthcare cost reduction in other ways. One strategy is to devise systems of care that prevent unnecessary or unwanted ICU admissions—given the small amount of ICU care that is due to discretionary spending, the only real way to reduce ICU costs is to prevent ICU admissions in the first place.
Du and Kahn also argue for careful cost-effectiveness analyses, such as that supported by NICE in the UK:
These programs limit use of treatments that are not cost-effective, taking cost decisions out of the hands of physicians and putting them where they belong: in the hands of society at large… We will achieve real ICU savings only by encouraging a society committed to system-based reforms.
Emphasis added. One can debate “taking cost decisions out of the hands of physicians”, though Guidet & Beale‘s and Capuzzo & Rhodes‘s argument for more physician awareness of cost might provide a good intermediate position in this debate.
Finally, increasing ICU supply (that is, ICU beds) in response to well-conceived increases in ICU demand is not in itself bad; ICU supply must be able to respond to demands imposed by disasters or other emergencies. We need to seek out novel ways to provide this capacity without incurring potentially unnecessary fixed costs, perhaps from region-wide stockpiling of supplies and equipment, and region-wide pools of on-call physicians and other ICU personnel. In summary, current health-related literature offers a wide-ranging discussion of the growing costs of intensive care; in my opinion: more questions than answers at this stage, but hopefully the questions will ultimately lead to answers.
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