[Analysis of hospitalization costs for 278 venous thromboeboembolism patients with health insurance in China].

OBJECTIVE: To determine the hospitalization costs and their predictors for venous thromboembolism (VTE) [includes deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE)] patients with health insurance in China.
METHODS: In the study, 278 patients with DVT or PE were randomly selected by stratified two-stage sampling from the China Basic Medical Insurance Databases between 2009 and 2010. All the information of the patients' demographic characters, length of hospital stay, clinical characters and costs were collected for the analysis. The descriptive statistics, univariate and multivariable analyses were used in the data analysis.
RESULTS: All the 278 patients (mean age, 64.4 years; 58.3%, male) were evaluated, of whom, 61.9% were with DVT and 38.1% with PE. For all the VTE patients, the mean length-of-hospital stay was 15.8 days (15.0 days for DVT patients and 17.0 days for PE patients). The mean total cost was Chinese Yuan (CNY) 16 487.9 (median: 9 039.1), CNY 17 698.61 (median: 8 643.7) in patients with DVT and CNY 14 523.4 (median: 9 879.3) in patients with PE. The multiple linear regressions showed that the factors affecting hospitalization costs were length of hospital stay (P<0.001), region (P<0.05), hospital level (P<0.001), and type of anticoagulants (P<0.001).
CONCLUSION: The costs per hospitalization associated with DVT or PE events are substantial, which implies that standard preventions for VTE patients can be cost-saving.