{"id":8153,"date":"2011-05-04T15:14:29","date_gmt":"2011-05-04T19:14:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?p=8153"},"modified":"2011-07-19T17:44:26","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T21:44:26","slug":"study-estimates-that-atrial-fibrillation-adds-26-billion-to-yearly-u-s-healthcare-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2011\/05\/04\/study-estimates-that-atrial-fibrillation-adds-26-billion-to-yearly-u-s-healthcare-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Study Estimates That Atrial Fibrillation Adds $26 Billion to Yearly U.S. Healthcare Costs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Atrial fibrillation may add $26 billion to the nation&#8217;s healthcare bill, according to <a href=\"http:\/\/circoutcomes.ahajournals.org\/content\/early\/2011\/05\/03\/CIRCOUTCOMES.110.958165.abstract?papetoc\">a study published in <em>Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes<\/em><\/a>. Michael Kim and colleagues compared insurance claims for 1 year from 89,066 AF patients with claims from controls matched for gender, age, and other medical conditions and found that AF results in a net incremental cost\u00a0 per patient per year of $8,705.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the additional costs came from more frequent hospitalizations in the AF group: AF patients were twice as likely as controls to be hospitalized (37.5% vs. 17.5%) and three times as likely to have multiple hospitalizations (11.1% vs. 3.3%). Some $6 billion was spent directly on costs related to AF; $9.9 billion for non-AF cardiovascular care; and $10.1 billion went for noncardiovascular health costs.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We\u2019re not going to impact healthcare costs or cardiovascular outcomes by just addressing atrial fibrillation itself,&#8221; said Michael Kim, the lead author of the study, in an AHA press release. &#8220;The large amount of cardiovascular disease among atrial fibrillation patients appears to worsen outcomes and increase costs. This is a sicker population.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sanofi-Aventis, the manufacturer of the AF drug dronedarone (Multaq), provided financial and editorial support for the development of the manuscript of the paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Atrial fibrillation may add $26 billion to the nation&#8217;s healthcare bill, according to a study published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. Michael Kim and colleagues compared insurance claims for 1 year from 89,066 AF patients with claims from controls matched for gender, age, and other medical conditions and found that AF results in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[365,830],"class_list":["post-8153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electrophysiology","tag-af","tag-costs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}