Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 15, 2020
Date Accepted: Feb 19, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Potential cost-effectiveness of telemonitoring program for heart failure patients during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong
ABSTRACT
Background:
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused patients to avoid seeking medical care. Provision of telemonitoring (TM) program in addition to usual care (UC) demonstrated improved effectiveness in managing heart failure (HF) patients.
Objective:
We aimed to examine the potential clinical and health economic outcomes of TM program for management of HF patients during COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of healthcare provider in Hong Kong.
Methods:
A Markov model was designed to compare outcomes of (1) UC plus TM (TM group) and (2) UC alone (UC group) in a hypothetical cohort of elderly HF patients in Hong Kong. Model outcome measures were direct medical cost, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs). Sensitivity analyses were performed to examine the model assumptions and robustness of base-case results.
Results:
In base-case analysis, TM group gained higher QALYs (1.9007) at higher costs (USD15,888), when compared to UC group (1.8345 QALYs at USD15,603).Adopting 48,937 USD/QALY (1× gross domestic product per capita of Hong Kong) as the willingness-to-pay threshold, the TM group was accepted as a highly cost-effective strategy, with ICER of 4,292 USD/QALY. No threshold value was identified in deterministic sensitivity analysis. In probabilistic sensitivity analysis, TM group was accepted as cost-effective in 99.22% of 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations.
Conclusions:
Adding TM program to usual care for HF patients appears to be a cost-effective strategy from the perspective of healthcare provider in Hong Kong.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.