|
Activity Number:
|
295
|
|
Type:
|
Invited
|
|
Date/Time:
|
Tuesday, August 5, 2008 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
|
|
Sponsor:
|
Section on Health Policy Statistics
|
| Abstract - #300035 |
|
Title:
|
Estimating Health Care Treatment Costs with Censoring and End-of-Life
|
|
Author(s):
|
Willard G. Manning*+ and Anirban Basu
|
|
Companies:
|
The University of Chicago and The University of Chicago
|
|
Address:
|
Harris School of Public Policy, Room 193, Chicago, IL, 60637,
|
|
Keywords:
|
healthcare costs ; skewness ; censoring
|
|
Abstract:
|
Although most analyses of health-care costs use annual or per member per month methods, many applications need to examine either the lifetime costs of a diagnosis or the costs of an episode of health care or illness. These applications require robust methods to properly characterize the time-profile of costs over this episode or lifetime of the patient. Such cases are common for the analysis of clinical trials data and cost-effectiveness analysis. Standard methods do not address the analytical issues of right-censoring due to the end of the period of observation occurring before death or the end of the episode. Additionally, concerns about time to death and its implications for cost profiles have not been incorporated in traditional estimators. We have concerns about the robustness of the existing methods, especially given the extreme skewness typical of these data.
|
