An empirical approach to estimating the effect of e-health on medical expenditure.

We studied the e-health system used in Nishi-aizu Town in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. The system allows elderly people at home to transmit vital signs data to the Town's health centre, where nurses provide advice based on the data. Our hypothesis was that the e-health system in Nishi-aizu Town reduced the need to visit clinics. We attempted to prove this by a regression analysis, in which days for treatment were compared between users and non-users of e-health. The results showed that days for treatment of e-health users were shorter than those of non-users by 1.6 days per year. Thus the total reduction in expenditure as a result of fewer hospital visits (emergency and elective) was about 16,000 yen per year. In a previous study, we proved that in Nishi-aizu Town the medical expenditure of e-health users was smaller than those of non-users by 15,688 yen. The results of the present study therefore coincide with those of the previous one and show that the reduction of medical expenditure is principally caused by the reduction of days for treatment.