Venue: The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 1 Towerview Drive, Durham, NC 27708-0120

 

Presentation

Modelling the impact of obesity on hospital costs

Authors: Katharina Hauck (Monash University); Bruce Hollingsworth (Monash University)

Presenter: Bruce Hollingsworth (Monash University)

Discussant: Melayne M. McInnes (University of South Carolina)

Session: Cost of Obesity

Room: Seminar B

When: Monday 1 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Increasing obesity rates and associated risks of developing serious illnesses costs Australia an estimated $3.7 billion (2005), including $870 million in direct health care costs. However, this figure may underestimate the economic costs of treating illnesses aggravated by obesity. Obesity may not only directly cause illnesses, it may influence progression or severity of illnesses, including ones which are not traditionally thought of as obesity related.

This would imply that for a large variety of conditions, obese patients are more expensive to treat than non obese patients. Using quantile regression methods we estimate the differences in length of stay of obese versus non-obese inpatients at different levels of medical complexity for various hospital specialties. Data used are DRG based and include all inpatient episodes in public hospitals in Victoria in 2005/6. The dataset includes detailed individual patient and hospital characteristics.

In some specialties including 'General Surgery', 'Neurology' and 'Neurosurgery', obese patients do not stay significantly longer than non-obese patients in hospital. In other specialities including 'General Medicine', 'Orthopaedics', and 'Obstetrics', obese patients stay up to 3.5 days longer in hospital than non-obese patients, especially at higher levels of medical complexity. In a number of specialities including 'Cardiology', 'Vascular' and 'Rheumatology', obese patients stay shorter than non-obese patients, in particular at higher levels of complexity. We hypothesize that this surprising result may be explained by different treatment patterns in these specialties, for example, transfers to other hospitals or use of medical rather than surgical interventions.