Cost of Outpatient Blood Transfusion in Cancer Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To determine the cost of outpatient RBC transfusion from the provider's perspective at a major urban, academic cancer center. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We retrospectively studied 517 cancer patients with hematologic or solid tumors who received blood during fiscal year 1995 to 1996. A process-flow diagram was developed, and cost and utilization data for 12 months were collected and analyzed. A structured interview process was used to identify all direct and indirect costs from within the inpatient unit, blood bank, and outpatient clinic. Average costs were computed for the entire sample and for specific subgroups. RESULTS: In 1998 dollars, the average cost per RBC unit was $469 for adults and $568 for pediatric cancer patients. Adults and children generally received two and one RBC units per transfusion, respectively. Therefore, the average cost of a two-unit transfusion was $938 for adults. Patients with hematologic tumors required more RBC units (7.1 RBC units per year) at a higher average cost ($512 per RBC unit) than patients with solid tumors (4.7 RBC units per year, $474 per RBC unit). Further variations across tumor types were observed. Overhead, direct material, and direct labor represented 46%, 19%, and 35% of total costs respectively. CONCLUSION: The cost of outpatient RBC transfusions in cancer patients is higher than previously reported, in part because overhead costs and fixed costs might have been underestimated in previous studies. Furthermore, age, tumor type, and geographic variations in the cost of fixed assets and labor have a substantial impact on the cost of blood. The results indicate that the cost-effectiveness of alternatives to transfusions in the management of cancer patients may have been underestimated in the existing literature.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".