A Prospective Micro-costing Pilot Study of the Health Economic Costs of Acute Kidney Injury

INTRODUCTION: Acute kidney injury (AKI) prevalence in the UK is estimated to be approximately 20% of all emergency admissions. Complications of AKI have a huge impact on health care costs. Most studies that have researched the economic costs of AKI have used macro-level costing using national tariffs and applying this to hospital episode statistics. METHODS: The Acute Kidney Outreach to Reduce Deterioration and Death (AKORDD) study was a pilot study that tested the provision of early specialist advice to improve outcomes for patients with AKI. As part of this prospective study, we undertook a health economics substudy that involved micro-costing to help more accurately define the total cost per patient. RESULTS: We found that the total cost of providing an AKI alert system and an outreach service (intervention group) was lower than current practice (control group) for patients with AKI. Overall, an episode of AKI that required inpatient care costs approximately £5000 over 12 months, which is somewhat higher than previous UK estimates. Although it was feasible to collect the required complex dataset needed to conduct a health economics analysis of an outreach service, significant amounts of time and resources needed to be dedicated to this endeavor. CONCLUSION: We showed that it is possible to demonstrate a clearer, more detailed picture of the prolonged economic costs of AKI for a health care system, as part of a substudy of a larger trial. A larger scale, randomized controlled trial of AKI outreach is needed, with a prospective full economic evaluation conducted alongside the trial.