Published in:
01-05-2016 | Original Paper
Informing management on the future structure of hospital care: an extrapolation of trends in demand and costs in lung diseases
Published in: The European Journal of Health Economics | Issue 4/2016
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Objective
The planning of health care management benefits from understanding future trends in demand and costs. In the case of lung diseases in the national German hospital market, we therefore analyze the current structure of care, and forecast future trends in key process indicators.
Methods
We use standardized, patient-level, activity-based costing from a national cost calculation data set of respiratory cases, representing 11.9–14.1 % of all cases in the major diagnostic category “respiratory system” from 2006 to 2012. To forecast hospital admissions, length of stay (LOS), and costs, the best adjusted models out of possible autoregressive integrated moving average models and exponential smoothing models are used.
Results
The number of cases is predicted to increase substantially, from 1.1 million in 2006 to 1.5 million in 2018 (+2.7 % each year). LOS is expected to decrease from 7.9 to 6.1 days, and overall costs to increase from 2.7 to 4.5 billion euros (+4.3 % each year). Except for lung cancer (−2.3 % each year), costs for all respiratory disease areas increase: surgical interventions +9.2 % each year, COPD +3.9 %, bronchitis and asthma +1.7 %, infections +2.0 %, respiratory failure +2.6 %, and other diagnoses +8.5 % each year. The share of costs of surgical interventions in all costs of respiratory cases increases from 17.8 % in 2006 to 30.8 % in 2018.
Conclusions
Overall costs are expected to increase particularly because of an increasing share of expensive surgical interventions and rare diseases, and because of higher intensive care, operating room, and diagnostics and therapy costs.