Jason Shafrin’s journal round-up for 7th October 2019

Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.

Combined impact of future trends on healthcare utilisation of older people: a Delphi study. Health Policy [PubMed] [RePEc] Published October 2019

Governments need to plan for the future. This is particularly important in countries where the government pays for the lion’s share of health care expenditures. Predicting the future, however, is not an easy task. One could use quantitative approaches and simply extrapolate recent trends. One could attempt to consult with political experts to determine what policies are likely to be incurred. Another approach is to use a Delphi Panel to elicit expert opinions on future trends in health care utilization to help predict future health care needs. This approach was the one taken by Ravensbergen and co-authors in an attempt to predict trends in health care utilization among older adults in the Netherlands in 2040.

The Delphi Panel approach was applied in this study as follows. First, individuals received a questionnaire via email. Researchers presented the experts with trends from the Dutch Public Health Foresight Study (Volksgezondheid Toekomst Verkenning) to help ground all experts with the same baseline information. The data and questions largely asked separately about trends for either the old (65–80 years) or the oldest old (>80 years). After the responses from the first questionnaire were received, responses were summarized and provided back to each panelist in an anonymous manner. Panelists were then able to revise their views on a second questionnaire taking into account the feedback by the other panelists. Because the panelists did not meet in person, this approach should be considered a modified Delphi Panel.

The Delphi panel identified three broad trends: increased use of eHealth tools, less support, and change in health status. While the panel thought eHealth was important, experts rarely reached consensus how eHealth would affect healthcare utilization. The experts did find consensus, however, in believing that the the share of adults aged 50-64 will decline relative to the share of individuals aged ≥ 85 years, implying fewer caregivers will be available and more of the oldest old will be living independently (i.e. with less support). Because less informal care will be available, the Delphi believed that the demand for home care and general practitioner services will rise. The respondents also believed that in most cases changes in health status will increase health care utilization of general practitioner and specialist services. There was less agreement about trends in the need for long-term care or mental health services, however.

The Delphi Panel approach may be useful to help governments predict future demand for services. More rigorous approaches, such as betting markets, are likely not feasible since the payouts would take too long to generate much interest. Betting markets could be used to predict shorter-run trends in health care utilization. The risk with betting markets, however, is that some individuals could act strategically to drive up or down predictions to increase or decrease reimbursement for certain sectors.

In short, the Delphi Panel is likely a reasonable, low-cost approach for predicting trends in health care utilization. Future studies, however, should validate how good the predictions are from using this type of method.

The fold-in, fold-out design for DCE choice tasks: application to burden of disease. Medical Decision Making [PubMed] Published 29th May 2019

Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) are a useful way to determine what treatment attributes patients (or providers or caregivers) value. Respondents are presented with multiple treatment options and the options can be compared across a series of attributes. An attribute could be treatment efficacy, safety, dosing, cost, or a host of other attributes. One can use this approach to measure the marginal rate of substitution across attributes. If cost is one of the attributes, one can measure willingness to pay for specific attributes.

One of the key challenges of DCEs, however, is attribute selection. Most treatments differ across a range of attributes. Most published DCEs however have four, five, or at most seven attributes presented. Including more attributes makes comparisons too complicated for most respondents. Thus, researchers are left with a difficult choice: (i) a tractable but overly simplified survey, or (ii) a realistic, but overly complex survey unlikely to be comprehended by respondents.

One solution proposed by Lucas Goossens and co-authors is to use a Fold-in Fold-out (FiFo) approach. In this approach, related attributes may be grouped into domains. For some questions, all attributes within the same domain have the same attribute level (i.e., fold in); in other questions, attributes may vary within the domain (i.e., fold out).

To be concrete, in the Goossens paper, they examine treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD). They use 15 attributes divided into three domains plus two stand-alone attributes:

a respiratory symptoms domain (with four attributes: shortness of breath at rest, shortness of breath during physical activity, coughing, and sputum production), a limitations domain (four attributes: limitations in strenuous physical activities, limitations in moderate physical activities, limitations in daily activities, and limitations in social activities), a mental problems domain (five attributes: feeling depressed, fearing that breathing gets worse, worrying, listlessness, and tense feeling), a fatigue attribute, and an exacerbations attribute.

This creative approach simplifies the choice set for respondents, but allows for a large number of attributes. Using the data collected, the authors used a Bayesian mixed logit regression model to conduct the analysis. The utility function underlying this assumed domain-specific parameters, but also included parameters for within-domain attribute weights to vary in the questions where it was folded out.

One key challenge, however, is that the authors found that individuals placed more weight on attributes when their domains were folded out (i.e., attribute levels varied within domain) compared to when their domains were folded in (i.e., attribute levels were the same within the domain). Thus, I would say that if five, six or seven attributes can capture the lion’s share of differences in treatment attributes across treatments, use the standard approach; however, if more attributes are needed, the FiFo approach is an attractive option researchers should consider.

The health and cost burden of antibiotic resistant and susceptible Escherichia coli bacteraemia in the English hospital setting: a national retrospective cohort study. PLoS One [PubMed] Published 10th September 2019

Bacterial infections are bad. The good news is that we have antibiotics to treat them so they no longer are a worry, right? While conventional wisdom may believe that we have many antibiotics to treat these infections, in recent years antibiotic resistance has grown. If antibiotics no longer are effective, what is the cost to society?

One effort to quantify the economic burden of antibiotic resistance by Nichola Naylor and co-authors used national surveillance and administrative data from National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in England. They compared the cost for patients with similar observable characteristics with E. coli bacteraemia compared to those who did not have E. coli bacteraemia. Antibiotic resistance in the study was defined as E. coli bacteraemia using laboratory-based definitions of ‘resistant’ and ‘intermediate’ isolates. The antibiotics to which resistance was considered included ciprofloxacin, third generation cephalosporins (ceftazidime and/or cefotaxime), gentamicin, piperacillin/tazobactam and carbapenems (imipenem and/or meropenem).

The authors use an Aalen-Johansen estimator to measure cumulative incidence of in-hospital mortality and length of stay. Both approaches control for the patient’s age, sex, Elixhauser comorbidity index, and hospital trust type. It does not appear that the authors control for the reason for admission to the hospital nor do they propensity match people with those without antibiotic resistance. Thus, it is likely that significant unobserved heterogeneity across groups remains in the analysis.

Despite these limitations, the authors do have some interesting findings. First, bacterial infections are associated with increased risk of death. In-hospital mortality is 14.3% for individuals infected with E. Coli compared to 1.3% for those not infected. Accounting for covariates, the subdistribution hazard rate (SHR) for in-hospital mortality due to E. coli bacteraemia was 5.88. Second, E. coli bacteraemia was associated with 3.9 excess hospital days compared to patients who were not antibiotic resistance. These extra hospital days cost £1,020 per case of E. coli bacteraemia and the estimated annual cost of E. coli bacteraemia in England was £14.3m. If antibiotic resistance has increased in recent years, these estimates are likely to be conservative.

The issue of antibiotic resistance presents a conundrum for policymakers. If current antibiotics are effective, drug-makers will have no incentive to develop new antibiotics since the new treatments are unlikely to be prescribed. On the other hand, failing to identify new antibiotics in reserve means that as antibiotic resistance grows, there will be few treatment alternatives. To address this issue, the United Kingdom is considering a ‘subscription style‘ approach to pay for new antibiotics to incentivize the development of new treatments.

Nevertheless, the paper by Naylor and co-authors provides a useful data point on the cost of antibiotic resistance.

Credits