The effect of pre-existing health conditions on the cost of recovery from road traffic injury: insights from data linkage of medicare and compensable injury claims in Victoria, Australia

Behrooz Hassani-Mahmooei; Janneke Berecki-Gisolf; Youjin Hahn; Roderick J McClure

doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1386-6

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The effect of pre-existing health conditions on the cost of recovery from road traffic injury: insights from data linkage of medicare and compensable injury claims in Victoria, Australia

Journal article

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The effect of pre-existing health conditions on the cost of recovery from road traffic injury: insights from data linkage of medicare and compensable injury claims in Victoria, Australia

Behrooz Hassani-Mahmooei, Janneke Berecki-Gisolf, Youjin Hahn and Roderick J McClure

BMC Health Services Research, Vol.16(1), pp.1-8

2016

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-016-1386-6

PMCID: PMC4850713

PMID: 27130277

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Abstract

pre-existing conditions

health service use

recovery

traffic accident

injury

Australia

Background: Comorbidity is known to affect length of hospital stay and mortality after trauma but less is known about its impact on recovery beyond the immediate post-accident care period. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of pre-existing health conditions in the cost of recovery from road traffic injury using health service use records for 1 year before and after the injury. Methods: Individuals who claimed Transport Accident Commission (TAC) compensation for a non-catastrophic injury that occurred between 2010 and 2012 in Victoria, Australia and who provided consent for Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) linkage were included (n = 738) in the analysis. PBS and MBS records dating from 12 months prior to injury were provided by the Department of Human Services (Canberra, Australia). Pre-injury use of health service items and pharmaceuticals were considered to indicate pre-existing health condition. Bayesian Model Averaging techniques were used to identify the items that were most strongly correlated with recovery cost. Multivariate regression models were used to determine the impact of these items on the cost of injury recovery in terms of compensated ambulance, hospital, medical, and overall claim cost. Results: Out of the 738 study participants, 688 used at least one medical item (total of 15,625 items) and 427 used at least one pharmaceutical item (total of 9846). The total health service cost of recovery was $10,115,714. The results show that while pre-existing conditions did not have any significant impact on the total cost of recovery, categorical costs were affected: e.g. on average, for every anaesthetic in the year before the accident, hospital cost of recovery increased by 24 % [95 % CI: 13, 36 %] and for each pathological test related to established diabetes, hospital cost increased by $10,407 [5466.78, 15346.28]. For medical costs, each anaesthetic led to $258 higher cost [174.16, 341.16] and every prescription of drugs used in diabetes increased the cost by 8 % [5, 11 %]. Conclusions: Services related to pre-existing conditions, mainly chronic and surgery-related, are likely to increase certain components of cost of recovery after road traffic trauma but pre-existing physical health has little impact on the overall recovery costs.

Details

Title: The effect of pre-existing health conditions on the cost of recovery from road traffic injury: insights from data linkage of medicare and compensable injury claims in Victoria, Australia
Authors: Behrooz Hassani-Mahmooei (Author) - Monash University
Janneke Berecki-Gisolf (Author) - Monash University
Youjin Hahn (Author) - Monash University
Roderick J McClure (Author) - Harvard University
Publication details: BMC Health Services Research, Vol.16(1), pp.1-8
Publisher: BioMed Central
Date published: 2016
DOI: 10.1186/s12913-016-1386-6
ISSN: 1472-6963
PMID: 27130277; PMC4850713
Copyright note: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Organisation Unit: Centre for Human Factors and Systems Science; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99651248302621
Output Type: Journal article

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