HEORStrategies’ Dr. Naomi Sacks is a co-author on a study of healthcare resource use and costs in cardiac arrhythmia patients with paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia (PSVT) who undergo catheter ablation.
Dr. Naomi Sacks, HEORStrategies Vice President, is a co-author of a study just published in the International Journal of Cardiology. The researchers were interested in the effects of catheter ablation, a surgical procedure considered curative, on healthcare resource utilization (HRU) and expenditures for patients newly diagnosed with PSVT, a fairly common cardiac arrhythmia that may lead to more frequent interactions with the healthcare system and, thus, higher expenditures. The team compared HRU and direct medical costs for newly diagnosed PSVT patients treated with ablation to HRU and direct medical costs for propensity-score-matched PSVT patients treated with medical therapy alone. Not surprisingly, expenditures for ablated patients were significantly higher in the first year following diagnosis, due to the cost of the ablation procedure. In the next two years, however, expenditures for the ablated patients decreased to the levels observed in patients treated with medical therapy alone, and the expenditures for both patient groups were substantially higher than those of matched patients with no evidence of PSVT. The factors underlying these sustained expenditures following catheter ablation are not understood. Dr. Sacks and co-authors suggest that additional study is warranted to elucidate the barriers to achieving cost savings following a potentially curative procedure.
You can see this important study at Catheter ablation for supraventricular tachycardia and health resource utilization and expenditures: A propensity-matched cohort study – ScienceDirect