Economic Evaluation of Telerehabilitation: Systematic Literature Review of Cost-Utility Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Telerehabilitation could benefit a large population by increasing adherence to rehabilitation protocols. OBJECTIVE: Our objective was to review and discuss the use of cost-utility approaches in economic evaluations of telerehabilitation interventions. METHODS: A review of the literature on PubMed, Scopus, Centres for Review and Dissemination databases (including the HTA database, the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, and the NHS Economic Evaluation Database), Cochrane Library, and ClinicalTrials.gov (last search on February 8, 2021) was conducted in accordance with PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. The inclusion criteria were defined in accordance with the PICOS (population, intervention, comparison, outcomes, and study design) system: the included studies had to evaluate patients in rehabilitation therapy for all diseases and disorders (population) through exercise-based telerehabilitation (intervention) and had to have a control group that received face-to-face rehabilitation (comparison), and these studies had to evaluate effectiveness through gain in quality of life (outcome) and used the design of randomized and controlled clinical studies (study). RESULTS: We included 11 economic evaluations, of which 6 concerned cardiovascular diseases. Several types of interventions were assessed as telerehabilitation, consisting in monitoring of rehabilitation at home (monitored by physicians) or a rehabilitation program with exercise and an educational intervention at home alone. All studies were based on randomized clinical trials and used a validated health-related quality of life instrument to describe patients' health states. Four evaluations used the EQ-5D, 1 used the EQ-5D-5L, 2 used the EQ-5D-3L, 3 used the Short-Form Six-Dimension questionnaire, and 1 used the 36-item Short Form survey. The mean quality-adjusted life years gained using telerehabilitation services varied from -0.09 to 0.89. These results were reported in terms of the probability that the intervention was cost-effective at different thresholds for willingness-to-pay values. Most studies showed results about telerehabilitation as dominant (ie, more effective and less costly) together with superiority or noninferiority in outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: There is evidence to support telerehabilitation as a cost-effective intervention for a large population among different disease areas. There is a need for conducting cost-effectiveness studies in countries because the available evidence has limited generalizability in such countries. TRIAL REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42021248785; https://tinyurl.com/4xurdvwf.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".