Team:Dundee/Implementation/financial

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Dundee 2014

Financial Savings

What we can save

To get a better understand of how the L.A.S.S.O. could be implemented into society we constructed several financial models. We followed the idealistic view that The Lung Ranger, and more specifically the implemented L.A.S.S.O., could give a quicker quantitative bacterial load within patients’ lung infections. This would enable faster eradication, and thus create a healthier CF community requiring less hospital treatment. We used the data available from the CF Registry 2013 Annual Report and investigated the amount of time CF patients spend on IV treatment at home and at the hospital. We then introduced our hypotheses; the L.A.S.S.O. could decrease the IV treatment duration by 10%, 30% and 50%. Following this idea through we were able to see the impact of this with regards to the scale of the CF patient community, the NHS and the UK.

The CF patients remained at the core of our project. Thus, we wanted to look into the days off the CF community would need on an annual scale based around IV treatment. Within this we constructed two models; one based on the paediatric CF patients, Fig 2, and one based on those aged 16 or above in employment or full time study, Fig 1.

Currently on average, a working or studying CF patient is losing out 40 days a year based on their IV treatment. A month and a half contributes to a big loss in work load. With 10% implementation these days could be cut down to 36 days, and then with 50% of the length of IV treatment cut down by The Lung Ranger this could cut down to 20 days.

Furthermore, a child with CF spends on average 30 days annually getting IV treatment; possibly missing school days. With 10% implementation these days could be cut down to 27 days. With 50% of the length of IV treatment cut down by The Lung Ranger this could cut down to 15 days changing the time lost from a month to a fortnight.

Whilst regarding the costs related to the NHS we looked into the cost associated with one day of hospitalization which was £2641. We looked into the average number of days for which patients are hospitalized along with the number of patients and computed the hypotheses alongside this data. From this we concluded that if the length of hospitalized IV treatment could be cut down by 10%, on the scale of the registry it could save £1.5 million. However, if the long term tracking of lung infections could cut down the length of hospitalized IV treatment by 50%, the cost could be cut by half thus saving £7.7 million.

References

1 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/213060/2011-12-reference-costs-publication.pdf

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