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Webtools to calculate direct medical costs of injury
The injury field is very dynamic and heterogeneous. Therefore, priority setting is extremely important for policy makers within this area to efficiently reduce the national burden of injuries. Priority setting is preferably based on a set of reliable indicators of population health, including information on the medical costs of injury. Information about costs is an important supplement to epidemiological data, such as the incidence and mortality rates. Recently (2001-2004) within the framework of a project named EUROCOST, a uniform method to calculate direct medical costs of injury was developed and applied to ten EU countries. This method allowed calculation of medical costs of injury by sex, age, external cause and type of injury at country level and EU level. Moreover, due to several harmonization procedures, meaningful international comparisons of injury incidence and costs can be made.
Within the current project (as part of APOLLO) the methodology as developed in the EUROCOST project is used to support EU countries in calculating the direct medical costs of injury, by developing a manual, guidelines and tools and making this method available on this website.
The model to calculate direct medical costs of injury is based on hospital-based surveillance systems. The necessary data sets for the calculation of direct medical costs are based on the following injury incidence and health care consumption data systems:
- Emergency Department register (ED-system) or related surveillance systems; records of patients treated at an Emergency Department.
->preferably based on EU Injury Data Base (IDB), but any other system which can be transformed to the ED-data set description will do.
- Hospital Discharge Register (HDR-system); records of patients admitted to hospital.
-> preferably based on ICD-9 or ICD-10, but any other system which can be transformed to the HDR-data set description will do.
The following materials were developed to help you construct a model for the calculation of direct medical costs:
- Guidelines with an explanation of the methods for the data analysis of surveillance data Manual + Annexes
- Webtools for the data analysis:
- Scripts/syntaxes to analyse, harmonize, aggregate and merge ED and HDR data (SPSS syntaxes 'IDB', 'ISS', 'ICD9', 'ICD10' + PDF files 'IDB', 'ISS', 'ICD9', 'ICD10')
- Script/syntax for calculating direct medical costs (SPSS syntax Building cost model + PDF Building cost model)
In the guideline (and annexes) a description is given about the collection, harmonisation and analysis of data on injury incidence and related healthcare consumption and costs. The steps are described that should be taken to calculate the direct medical costs of injury for your country.
The scripts/syntaxes are build to use within SPSS. For those not having SPSS available the SPSS-syntaxes/scripts are in a text-format available in a Word-textfile.
The manual, annexes and scripts/syntaxes are tools to help you calculate direct medical costs. Read and use these tools carefully and proceed step by step. It is likely that each user need to make adjustments to the tools, because of country specific circumstances.
If you have questions about the guidelines and webtools please contact:
Suzanne Polinder, Erasmus Medical Center, E-mail: s.polinder@erasmusmc.nl, or
Hidde Toet, Consumer Safety Institute, E-mail: h.toet@veiligheid.nl
This module is aimed at supporting EU countries in calculating the economic consequences of injury for purposes of priority setting in prevention.
Module leader
Hidde Toet
Consumer Safety Institute
Rijswijkstraat 2
1059 GK Amsterdam
Netherlands
Tel. 00 31 20 5114553
E-mail: h.toet@consafe.nl
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