Objectives
A healthcare system faces both budgetary and resource constraints on treatment provision. Standard modelling approaches focus heavily on the treatment costs and impact on the budget; however, little attention is given to the resource utilisation within a healthcare system. Capacity pressures on resources would require slow structural healthcare system changes, such as increasing bed space, practitioner time and specialist equipment availability. This provides challenges additional to creating budgetary headroom. This study aimed to analyse the resource use of different interventions and evaluate the implications treatments have on resource capacity constraints.
Methods
A resource utilization model (RUM) was developed to model the likelihood of different treatments reaching capacity constraint for different resources. The modelling approach combined expected time on treatment with treatment scheduling to estimate resource use. The framework evaluates subcutaneous versus intravenous administration of rituximab within chemotherapy for treating B-cell Lymphoma to highlight the reduced resource burden achieved for each patient treated subcutaneously.
Results
The model reveals that subcutaneous administration is expected to reduce administration time by 79.6%, reduce time in hospital by up to 14.8%, and halve the time a patient occupies a chair or bed during infusion. Within a one-million-person insurance plan, 3.2 patients are expected to suffer from B-cell lymphoma. Subcutaneous administration would save 58.7 hours of infusion time, 85.3 hours of infusion chair or bed time, and 34.3 hours of time spent in hospital for these patients.
Conclusions
These results have shown reductions in resource use across all elements assessed, with the greatest reductions seen for administration time. Therefore, the change to subcutaneous treatment will greatly decrease the need for specialised equipment for these patients. It may be preferable for healthcare systems to opt for more expensive and less resource burdensome treatments as opposed to structural changes required to accommodate more resource intensive treatments.
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