Impact of completing chronic hepatitis C (CHC) treatment on post-therapy healthcare cost
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Chronic hepatitis C (CHC) is associated with significant economic burden. This study evaluated the healthcare cost alleviation associated with treatment of CHC. METHODS: Health insurance claims from 60 self-insured US companies were analyzed (01/2001-03/2012). Adult patients with ≥1 CHC diagnosis (ICD-9-CM: 070.44, 070.54), initiating interferon, and with ≥2 dispensings and with ≥48 weeks of follow-up were selected. Patients diagnosed with HIV or who completed only 24 weeks of interferon therapy (a surrogate for CHC genotypes 2 and 3) were excluded from the study. Interferon users were categorized into complete and discontinued therapy cohorts. During the post-48-week treatment period, cohorts were compared for healthcare resource utilization using rate ratios (RRs), as well as healthcare costs using per-patient per-year (PPPY) cost differences. RESULTS: A total of 1017 patients who completed and 953 patients who discontinued interferon therapy were identified. Relative to the discontinued therapy cohort, the completed therapy cohort had significantly fewer hospitalizations (RR [95% CI] = 0.74 [0.68, 0.81], p < 0.001), outpatient visits (RR [95% CI] = 0.92 [0.91, 0.93], p < 0.001), and ER visits (RR [95% CI] = 0.93 [0.87, 1.00], p = 0.039), which translated into significantly lower total healthcare costs PPPY (cost difference [95% CI] = $4540 [1570, 7680], p = 0.004) and hospitalization costs (cost difference [95% CI] = $3039 [1140, 5248], p = 0.002). Non-CHC-related costs accounted for 55% and CHC-related costs for 45% of the all-cause cost difference between cohorts. LIMITATIONS: Claims data may have contained inaccuracies, and genotypes of patients with CHC could not be confirmed. The study consisted of privately insured individuals and may not be generalizable to the entire CHC population. CONCLUSION: Compared to discontinued therapy patients, CHC patients who completed interferon therapy and presumably had a higher rate of achieving SVR were found to have lower levels of healthcare resource utilization and costs post-therapy. The reduction was primarily in costs associated with non-HCV-related comorbidities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".