Tag health care costs

Thesis Thursday: Elizabeth Lemmon

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On the third Thursday of every month, we speak to a recent graduate about their thesis and their studies. This month’s guest is Dr Elizabeth Lemmon who has a PhD from the University of Stirling. If you would like to suggest a candidate for an upcoming Thesis Thursday, get in touch.

Title
Essays on the provision of long term care to older adults in Scotland
Supervisors
David Bell, Alasdair Rutherford
Repository link
http://hdl.handle.net/1893/29369

What long term care provision is available to older people in Scotland?

Long term care (LTC) in Scotland comprises both formal care and unpaid care. Formal care encompasses care provided by professionals in a person’s own home as well as care in a residential care setting. Unpaid care is care that is provided by family members, friends, or neighbours. Long term care is provided to older people who need help because they are ill, frail or have a disability. It might mean help with more administrative tasks such as filling in forms, paying bills, shopping, and housework, but can also mean help with things of a more personal nature such as washing and dressing. Since 2002, individuals living in Scotland aged 65 or over are entitled to free personal care (FPC) at home, subject to a needs assessment. This makes Scotland quite different to England, where personal care costs are borne by the service user and their families, and provides a unique opportunity to conduct research.

What were the pros and cons of your chosen data sources?

I used three data sources in my PhD. Those included the Family Resources Survey (FRS), the Scottish Government’s administrative Social Care Survey (SCS) and publically available data zone level data. The key benefit of using survey data like the FRS was that they captured information about care recipients and their caregivers. I used these data in my third paper to look at unpaid carers’ Standard of Living (SoL). The down side of the FRS is that it only captures a subset of the population, which might be systematically different from the population at large. At the same time, although there is information on carers and the person they are caring for, this information is very limited for those who are not living with the care recipient. On the other hand, the benefit of using the SCS, which I used in my first two papers, is that it captures population level information about the provision of LTC services. However, unlike the FRS, the SCS was designed for administrative purposes meaning that it lacks the richness of information on client circumstances and characteristics. One solution to this is to use data zone level information as a proxy for those characteristics, but often this is not enough. Overall, the PhD highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of working with these different data sources, pointing to the potential of using linked administrative and survey data in future research.

How did you identify sources of inequity in the provision of long term care?

Inequity in the provision of LTC exists if there are differences in LTC provision after accounting for differences in need. I investigated this issue of inequity in my first paper. In particular, we observed from the raw data that there are big differences in FPC provision between the 32 Scottish local authorities. As I mentioned, FPC is available to anyone in Scotland aged 65+ who needs it. Perhaps those differences are due to differences in need. But I didn’t find that this was the case. It seemed that, even after accounting for the need of local authority populations, via the proportion of disability benefit claims, there were still large differences in provision of FPC. I modelled this inequity using a simple regression framework. The results from the regressions found that there is evidence of geographic inequity in the provision of FPC in Scotland. In particular, the analysis suggests that the differences between the FPC rate and the rate of disability are not consistent across local authorities, suggesting that a needy individual might be more or less likely to receive care depending on where they live. One explanation for this is that local authorities differ in terms of their practices for managing the demand for FPC. However, this is an area that would require more detailed investigation with individual local authorities to understand their practices.

What is the role of unpaid care, and how did you model that?

Unpaid care is defined as care that is provided by family members, partners, or friends to those who require help because they are ill, frail, or have a disability. The care that they provide is unpaid and often considered as having a zero cost in economic evaluations. This might lead to inefficient resource allocation and poor policy decisions. In my second paper, I tried to model the effect that unpaid carers have on the FPC use of the cared for. This was difficult due to the potential reverse causality that occurs between the two. I compared different models to try to estimate this effect. Overall, my findings suggest that unpaid carers likely complement FPC services in Scotland. This relationship might be due to unpaid carers advocating on behalf of the cared for, and demanding services from the local authority for them. They might do this because they require more support to enable them to remain in the labour force. It could also be that the type of care unpaid carers provide is different to that provided by formal carers.

Why did you use a ‘standard of living’ approach and what can it tell us about the cost of unpaid care?

The motivation for using the SoL approach, as implemented by Morciano et al (2015), was really that we felt it might capture more of the trade-offs that are involved in providing care. Specifically, it is expected that unpaid carers have to divert resources in order to pay for goods and services for the person they are caring for. Compared to the conventional costing methods which have focused on attaching a monetary value to the time a carer gives up in order to provide care, we argue that the SoL approach may capture a wider array of the trade-offs that are involved in providing unpaid care. For example, are unpaid carers less able to afford to go on holiday or to take part in a regular leisure activity? If it is the case that unpaid carers have to invest resources into providing care then they might have fewer resources to devote to their own needs and wants, resulting in unpaid carers having a lower SoL compared to non-carers. The results suggest that unpaid carers who are living with the person they are caring for would require compensation of £229 per week in order for them to reach the same SoL as a non-carer.

What are the key steps necessary to identify and address unmet need in this context?

My research highlighted that there is possibly unmet need for FPC in Scotland and that this could potentially be more likely for older people who don’t have an unpaid carer helping them to access FPC services. Understanding this unmet need is a key area which requires further research. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure and we only ever observe the met need for care, i.e. those who end up receiving formal care services. Thus, prior to addressing unmet need, it is important that we can measure it. One step necessary in doing so would be to carry out detailed investigations with individual local authorities. This would help us understand more about the needs of those individuals who apply for FPC but who are turned down. But this is only part of the picture. Understanding where individuals need FPC but don’t apply, either due to transaction costs, a lack of information on how to access those services, or other reasons, is far more difficult. One approach to gaining insight on these individuals could be to conduct qualitative interviews with them and their families.

Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 5th August 2019

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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.

The barriers and facilitators to model replication within health economics. Value in Health Published 16th July 2019

Replication is a valuable part of the scientific process, especially if there are uncertainties about the validity of research methods. When it comes to cost-effectiveness modelling, there are endless opportunities for researchers to do things badly, even with the best intentions. Attempting to replicate modelling studies can therefore support health care decision-making. But replication studies are rarely conducted, or, at least, rarely reported. The authors of this study sought to understand the factors that can make replication easy or difficult, with a view to informing reporting standards.

The authors attempted to replicate five published cost-effectiveness modelling studies, with the aim of recreating the key results. Each replication attempt was conducted by a different author and we’re even given a rating of the replicator’s experience level. The characteristics of the models were recorded and each replicator detailed – anecdotally – the things that helped or hindered their attempt. Some replications were a resounding failure. In one case, the replicated cost per patient was more than double the original, at more than £1,000 wide of the mark. Replicators reported that having a clear diagram of the model structure was a big help, as was the provision of example calculations and explicit listing of the key assumptions. Various shortcomings made replication difficult, all relating to a lack of clarity or completeness in reporting. The impact of this on the validation attempt was exacerbated if the model either involved lots of scenarios that weren’t clearly described or if the model had a long time horizon.

The quality of each study was assessed using the Philips checklist, and all did pretty well, suggesting that the checklist is not sufficient for ensuring replicability. If you develop and report cost-effectiveness models, this paper could help you better understand how end-users will interpret your reporting and make your work more replicable. This study focusses on Markov models. They’re definitely the most common approach, so perhaps that’s OK. It might be useful to produce prescriptive guidance specific to Markov models, informed by the findings of this study.

US integrated delivery networks perspective on economic burden of patients with treatment-resistant depression: a retrospective matched-cohort study. PharmacoEconomics – Open [PubMed] Published 28th June 2019

Treatment-resistant depression can be associated high health care costs, as multiple lines of treatment are tried, with patients experiencing little or no benefit. New treatments and models of care can go some way to addressing these challenges. In the US, there’s some reason to believe that integrated delivery networks (IDNs) could be associated with lower care costs, because IDNs are based on collaborative care models and constitute a single point of accountability for patient costs. They might be particularly useful in the case of treatment-resistant depression, but evidence is lacking. The authors of this study investigated the difference in health care resource use and costs for patients with and without treatment-resistant depression, in the context of IDNs.

The researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study using claims data for people receiving care from IDNs, with up to two years follow-up from first antidepressant use. 1,582 people with treatment-resistant depression were propensity score matched to two other groups – patients without depression and patients with depression that was not classified as treatment-resistant. Various regression models were used to compare the key outcomes of all-cause and specific categories of resource use and costs. Unfortunately, there is no assessment of whether the selected models are actually any good at estimating differences in costs.

The average costs and resource use levels in the three groups ranked as you would expect: $25,807 per person per year for the treatment-resistant group versus $13,701 in the non-resistant group and $8,500 in the non-depression group. People with treatment-resistant depression used a wider range of antidepressants and for a longer duration. They also had twice as many inpatient visits as people with depression that wasn’t treatment-resistant, which seems to have been the main driver of the adjusted differences in costs.

We don’t know (from this study) whether or not IDNs provide a higher quality of care. And the study isn’t able to compare IDN and non-IDN models of care. But it does show that IDNs probably aren’t a full solution to the high costs of treatment-resistant depression.

Rabin’s paradox for health outcomes. Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 19th June 2019

Rabin’s paradox arises from the theoretical demonstration that a risk-averse individual who turns down a 50:50 gamble of gaining £110 or losing £100 would, if expected utility theory is correct, turn down a 50:50 gamble of losing £1,000 or gaining millions. This is because of the assumed concave utility function over wealth that is used to model risk aversion and it is probably not realistic. But we don’t know about the relevance of this paradox in the health domain… until now.

A key contribution of this paper is that it considers both decision-making about one’s own health and decision-making from a societal perspective. Three different scenarios are set-up in each case, relating to gains and losses in life expectancy with different levels of health functioning. 201 students were recruited as part of a larger study on preferences and each completed all six gamble-pairs (three individual, three societal). To test for Rabin’s paradox, the participants were asked whether they would accept each gamble involving a moderate stake and a large stake.

In short, the authors observe Rabin’s proposed failure of expected utility theory. Many participants rejected small gambles but did not reject the larger gambles. The effect was more pronounced for societal preferences. Though there was a large minority for whom expected utility theory was not violated. The upshot of all this is that our models of health preferences that are based on expected utility may be flawed where uncertain outcomes are involved – as they often are in health. This study adds to a growing body of literature supporting the relevance of alternative utility theories, such as prospect theory, to health and health care.

My only problem here is that life expectancy is not health. Life expectancy is everything. It incorporates the monetary domain, which this study did not want to consider, as well as every other domain of life. When you die, your stock of cash is as useful to you as your stock of health. I think it would have been more useful if the study focussed only on health status and outcomes and excluded all considerations of death.

Credits

Thesis Thursday: Feng-An Yang

Chris Sampson Leave a comment

On the third Thursday of every month, we speak to a recent graduate about their thesis and their studies. This month’s guest is Dr Feng-An Yang who has a PhD from Ohio State University. If you would like to suggest a candidate for an upcoming Thesis Thursday, get in touch.

Title
Three essays on access to health care in rural areas
Supervisors
Daeho Kim, Joyce Chen
Repository link
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu152353045188255

What are the policy challenges for rural hospitals in the US?

Rural hospitals have been financially vulnerable, especially after the implementation of Medicare Prospective Payment System (PPS) in 1983, under which hospitals receive a predetermined, fixed reimbursement for their inpatient services. Under the PPS, they suffer from financial losses as their costs tend to exceed the reimbursement rate due to their smaller size and lower patient volume than their urban counterparts (Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, 2001 [PDF]). As a result, a noticeable number of rural hospitals have closed since the implementation of PPS (Congressional Budget Office, 1991 [PDF]).

This closure trend has slowed down thanks to public payment policies such as the Critical Access Hospitals (CAH) program, but rural hospitals are continuing to close their doors and a total of 107 rural hospitals have closed from 2010 to present according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. This issue has raised public concern for rural residents’ access to health services and health status, and how to keep rural hospitals open has become an important policy priority.

Which data sources and models did you use to identify key events?

My dissertation investigated the impact of the CAH program and hospital closure by compiling data from various sources. The primary data come from the Medicare cost report, which contains detailed financial statements for nearly every U.S. hospital. Historical data on health care utilization at the county-level are obtained from the Area Health Resource File. County-level mortality rates are calculated from the national mortality files. Lastly, the list of CAHs and closed hospitals is obtained from the Flex Monitoring Team and American Hospital Association Annual Survey, respectively. This list contains information on the hospital identifier and year of event which is key to my empirical strategy.

To identify the impact of key events (i.e., CAH conversion and hospital closure), I use an event-study approach exploiting the variation in the timing of events. This approach estimates the changes in outcome for the time relative to the ‘event time’. A primary advantage of this approach is that it allows a visual examination of the evolution of changes in outcome before and after the event.

How can policies relating to rural hospitals benefit patients?

This question is not trivial because public payment policies are not directly linked to patients. The primary objective of these policies is to strengthen rural hospitals’ financial viability by providing them with enhanced reimbursement. As a result, it has been expected that, under these policies, rural hospitals will improve their financial conditions and stay open, thereby maintaining the access to health services for rural residents. Broadly speaking, public payment policies can lead to an increase in accessibility if we compare patient access to health services between counties with at least one hospital receiving financial support and counties without any hospitals receiving financial support.

I look at patient benefits from three aspects: accessibility, health care utilization, and mortality. My research shows that the CAH program has substantially improved CAHs’ financial conditions and as a result, some CAHs that otherwise would have been closed have stayed open. This in turn leads to an increase in rural residents’ access to and use of health services. We then provide suggestive evidence that the increased access to and use of health care services have improved patient health in rural areas.

Did you find any evidence that policies could have negative or unexpected consequences?

Certainly. The second chapter of my dissertation focused on skilled nursing care which can be provided in either swing beds (inpatient beds that can be used interchangeably for inpatient care or skilled nursing care) or hospital-based skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). Since the services provided in swing beds and SNFs are equivalent, differential payments, if present, may encourage hospitals to use one over the other.

While the CAH program provides enhanced reimbursement to rural hospitals, it also changes the swing bed reimbursement method such that swing bed payments are more favorable than SNF payments. As a result, CAHs may have a financial incentive to increase the use of swing beds over SNFs. By focusing on CAHs with a SNF, my research shows a remarkable increase in swing bed utilization and this increase is fully offset by the decrease in SNF utilization. These results suggest that CAHs substitute swing beds for SNFs in response to the change in swing bed reimbursement method.

Based on your research, what would be your key recommendations for policymakers?

Based on my research findings, I would make two recommendations for policymakers.

First, my research speaks to the ongoing debate over the elimination of CAH designation for certain hospitals. Loss of CAH designation could have serious financial consequences and subsequently have potentially adverse impacts on patient access to and use of health care. Therefore, I would recommend policymakers to maintain the CAH designation.

Second, while the CAH program has improved rural hospitals’ financial conditions, it has also created a financial incentive for hospitals to use the service with a higher reimbursement rate. Thus, my recommendation to policymakers would be to consider potentially substitutable health care services when designing reimbursement rates.