Calculator identifies median state-specific medical costs and median absenteeism costs
TUESDAY, Sept. 15, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A chronic disease cost calculator (CDCC) has been developed to estimate state-level costs, according to a study published online Sept. 3 in Preventing Chronic Disease.
Justin G. Trogdon, Ph.D., from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues described the development of the CDCC by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They established disease-attributable annual per-person medical and absenteeism costs with publicly available and restricted secondary data from multiple national data sets from 2004 through 2008. For each disease (arthritis, asthma, cancer, congestive heart failure, coronary heart disease, hypertension, stroke, other heart disease, depression, and diabetes), the researchers derived total state medical and absenteeism costs by multiplying per-person costs from regressions by the number of people treated in the state.
The researchers found that the median state-specific medical costs varied from $410 million for asthma to $1.8 billion for diabetes. There was variation in median absenteeism costs, ranging from $5 million for congestive heart failure to $217 million for arthritis.
“CDCC provides methodologically rigorous chronic disease cost estimates,” the authors write. “These estimates highlight possible areas of cost savings achievable through targeted prevention efforts or research into new interventions and treatments.”
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