Cost‐Effectiveness of Total Knee Replacement: A Prospective Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Total knee replacement (TKR) rates have significantly increased in the past decade. While the procedure itself might be costly, the cost-effectiveness and potential offset costs from patient and societal benefits have not been clearly established. The objective of this study was to perform an economic evaluation of TKR in patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA). METHODS: We conducted a 6-month prospective cohort study of 212 patients with knee OA who underwent TKR at a single hospital in Houston, Texas. We included patient-level data from hospital billing databases and the patients' self-reported direct and indirect costs. The clinical outcome measure was pain and function measured by the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) questionnaire; we used the minimum clinically important difference (MCID; ≥20-point change) and the WOMAC 20% (WOMAC20), 50% (WOMAC50), and 70% (WOMAC70) relative improvement criteria. Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios were estimated using direct and indirect costs and WOMAC improvement. A societal perspective was used and multiple sensitivity analyses were performed to assess the robustness of the principal analysis. RESULTS: The total incremental cost per TKR was $20,133. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) for improvement at 6 months were $33,345, $25,255, $35,274, and $56,908 for the MCID, WOMAC20, WOMAC50, and WOMAC70, respectively. Best- and worst-case scenario sensitivity analyses did not have a significant impact on the ICERs. Patient time lost was the most influential variable in the multiway sensitivity analysis. CONCLUSION: TKR is an effective intervention in reducing pain and improving functional status among patients with knee OA and is cost effective at both low and high levels of improvement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".