A Cost Analysis of Catheter Ablation for Atrial Fibrillation: A Canadian Pre-Post Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: There is a paucity of Canadian studies using patient-level data to analyze the costs of catheter ablation (CA) for atrial fibrillation (AF). We sought to identify the health care resource use, costs, and cost predictors of CA. Methods: A cost analysis was performed in a population of AF patients treated with CA in Central Zone Nova Scotia from 2010 to 2018. Costs were compared 2 years before ablation (pre-CA) with costs 2 years after (post-CA); the 3-month period post-CA was defined as the treatment window. Costs were also compared according to CA technology defined as before 2015 for patients treated with non-contact force sensing CA and after 2015 for patients treated with contact force sensing CA. Results: Heart failure hospitalizations, AF-related emergency department visits, acute inpatient admissions, and cardioversions all decreased after ablation. The cost difference post-CA vs pre-CA was CAD$18,869 (95% confidence interval [CI], $15,570-$22,168). This increase in costs was driven by costs incurred during the treatment window, which was $21,439 (95% CI, $20,468-$22,409). After excluding treatment window costs, the mean year 1 post-CA cost was $11,223 (95% CI, $9113-$13,334) and year 2 post-CA cost was $4555 (95% CI, $3145-$5965); both were lower than the pre-CA costs. Costs remained stable over the time frame of the study period, with no influence from new technologies on cost. The post-CA cost difference between the post-2015 and pre-2015 groups was $2573 (95% CI, -$2336 to $7481). Conclusions: We showed that although CA is expensive, it might be a cost-effective treatment modality for AF because of the associated reduction in costs and health care resource use.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".