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Differences in medical costs between TCM users and TCM nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia

BACKGROUND: Thalassemia has brought serious health threats and economic burdens to patients worldwide. There is no sovereign remedy for thalassemia, both conventional and Traditional Medicine (TM) methods have certain effects on this disease. As typical of TM, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has...

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Autores principales: Han, Zhaoran, Nie, Hanlin, Huang, Zhengwei, Tuo, Zegui, Chen, Sisi, Ma, Yong, Shi, Xuefeng
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10268416/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37316816
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09651-w
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author Han, Zhaoran
Nie, Hanlin
Huang, Zhengwei
Tuo, Zegui
Chen, Sisi
Ma, Yong
Shi, Xuefeng
author_facet Han, Zhaoran
Nie, Hanlin
Huang, Zhengwei
Tuo, Zegui
Chen, Sisi
Ma, Yong
Shi, Xuefeng
author_sort Han, Zhaoran
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Thalassemia has brought serious health threats and economic burdens to patients worldwide. There is no sovereign remedy for thalassemia, both conventional and Traditional Medicine (TM) methods have certain effects on this disease. As typical of TM, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been widely used in the treatment of thalassemia. Previous studies mainly focused on conventional treatments for thalassemia and patients’ medical burden, but no research has examined the effects of TCM use on the economic burdens for thalassemia inpatients in mainland China. The main objective of this study is to compare the medical cost differences between TCM users and TCM nonusers, furtherly, we will discuss the role of TCM use in the treatment of thalassemia. METHODS: We employed the 2010–2016 Medicare claims database provided by the China Health Insurance Research Association (CHIRA). Chi-square and Mann-Whitney tests were used to analyze the differences between TCM users and TCM nonusers. Multiple regression analysis was performed using the ordinary least squares method to compare the TCM users’ inpatient medical cost with TCM nonusers’, and to further examine the correlation between TCM cost, conventional medication cost and nonpharmacy cost for TCM users. RESULTS: A total of 588 urban thalassemia inpatients were identified, including 222 TCM users and 366 TCM nonusers. The inpatient medical cost of TCM users was RMB10,048 (USD1,513), which was significantly higher than TCM nonusers (RMB1,816 (USD273)). Total inpatient cost for TCM users was 67.4% higher than those of TCM nonusers (P < 0.001). With confounding factors fixed, we found that the conventional medication cost and nonpharmacy cost were positively correlated with TCM cost. CONCLUSION: Total hospitalization expenses for TCM users were higher than TCM nonusers. Both the conventional medication cost and nonpharmacy cost of TCM users were all higher than TCM nonusers. We infer TCM plays a complementary role, rather than an alternative, in the treatment of thalassemia due to the lack of cooperative treatment guidelines. It is recommended that a cooperative diagnosis and treatment guidelines should be generated to balance the use of TCM and conventional medicine for treating thalassemia, so as to reduce the economic burdens on patients. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-023-09651-w.
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spelling pubmed-102684162023-06-15 Differences in medical costs between TCM users and TCM nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia Han, Zhaoran Nie, Hanlin Huang, Zhengwei Tuo, Zegui Chen, Sisi Ma, Yong Shi, Xuefeng BMC Health Serv Res Research BACKGROUND: Thalassemia has brought serious health threats and economic burdens to patients worldwide. There is no sovereign remedy for thalassemia, both conventional and Traditional Medicine (TM) methods have certain effects on this disease. As typical of TM, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been widely used in the treatment of thalassemia. Previous studies mainly focused on conventional treatments for thalassemia and patients’ medical burden, but no research has examined the effects of TCM use on the economic burdens for thalassemia inpatients in mainland China. The main objective of this study is to compare the medical cost differences between TCM users and TCM nonusers, furtherly, we will discuss the role of TCM use in the treatment of thalassemia. METHODS: We employed the 2010–2016 Medicare claims database provided by the China Health Insurance Research Association (CHIRA). Chi-square and Mann-Whitney tests were used to analyze the differences between TCM users and TCM nonusers. Multiple regression analysis was performed using the ordinary least squares method to compare the TCM users’ inpatient medical cost with TCM nonusers’, and to further examine the correlation between TCM cost, conventional medication cost and nonpharmacy cost for TCM users. RESULTS: A total of 588 urban thalassemia inpatients were identified, including 222 TCM users and 366 TCM nonusers. The inpatient medical cost of TCM users was RMB10,048 (USD1,513), which was significantly higher than TCM nonusers (RMB1,816 (USD273)). Total inpatient cost for TCM users was 67.4% higher than those of TCM nonusers (P < 0.001). With confounding factors fixed, we found that the conventional medication cost and nonpharmacy cost were positively correlated with TCM cost. CONCLUSION: Total hospitalization expenses for TCM users were higher than TCM nonusers. Both the conventional medication cost and nonpharmacy cost of TCM users were all higher than TCM nonusers. We infer TCM plays a complementary role, rather than an alternative, in the treatment of thalassemia due to the lack of cooperative treatment guidelines. It is recommended that a cooperative diagnosis and treatment guidelines should be generated to balance the use of TCM and conventional medicine for treating thalassemia, so as to reduce the economic burdens on patients. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-023-09651-w. BioMed Central 2023-06-14 /pmc/articles/PMC10268416/ /pubmed/37316816 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09651-w Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Han, Zhaoran
Nie, Hanlin
Huang, Zhengwei
Tuo, Zegui
Chen, Sisi
Ma, Yong
Shi, Xuefeng
Differences in medical costs between TCM users and TCM nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia
title Differences in medical costs between TCM users and TCM nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia
title_full Differences in medical costs between TCM users and TCM nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia
title_fullStr Differences in medical costs between TCM users and TCM nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia
title_full_unstemmed Differences in medical costs between TCM users and TCM nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia
title_short Differences in medical costs between TCM users and TCM nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia
title_sort differences in medical costs between tcm users and tcm nonusers in inpatients with thalassemia
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10268416/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37316816
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09651-w
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