One-year treatment costs of trauma care in the USA

Abstract

Although injuries are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the USA, few prior studies exist on the costs of trauma care. This article estimates treatment costs of care for 12 months following injury. Primary and secondary data were collected on over 5000 moderate-to-severely injured patients 18–84 years of age discharged from 69 US hospitals. Acute and post-acute costs of care were estimated from a combination of data sources: UB92 hospital bills, patient surveys, medical record abstracts, and where available, Medicare claims. Key analysis variables were demographic characteristics, insurance status and nature and severity of injury. Mean 1-year cost per patient of trauma care in our population was $75,210. On average, 58% of cost was accounted for by the index hospitalization. Total 1-year treatment cost of adult major trauma in the USA was conservatively estimated to be US$27 billion annually (2005).

Keywords::

• cost of illness
• elders
• insurance status
• trauma care

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Anthony Carlini, Katherine Frey and Lele Tang in working with the hospital bill and patient survey data, Christine Spencer for producing the per diem estimates for postindex inpatient care and the geographic input cost weights, Andrew Shore for assistance with the Medicare claims, Steven Strang for providing Kaiser Permanente’s index hospital cost estimates, Kathleen Dalton for generously sharing her mapping strategy for the cost-to-charge ratios, Ted Miller and Bruce Lawrence for producing the national incidence estimates, and ResDAC for assistance in preparing our Medicare claims data request.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

Funded by a grant (R49/CCR316840) from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a grant (R01/AG20361) from the National Institute on Aging of the NIH. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.