Cost-effectiveness of personalised telehealth intervention for chronic disease management: A pilot randomised controlled trial.

Objective: The study aims to assess the cost-effectiveness of a personalised telehealth intervention to manage chronic disease in the long run.
Method: The Personalised Health Care (PHC) pilot study was a randomised trial with an economic evaluation alongside over 12 months. From a health service perspective, the primary analysis compared the costs and effectiveness of PHC telehealth monitoring with usual care. An incremental cost-effectiveness ratio was calculated based on costs and health-related quality of life. The PHC intervention was implemented in the Barwon Health region, Geelong, Australia, for patients with a diagnosis of COPD and/or diabetes who had a high likelihood of hospital readmission over 12 months.
Results: When compared to usual care at 12 months, the PHC intervention cost AUD$714 extra per patient (95%CI -4879; 6308) with a significant improvement of 0.09 in health-related quality of life (95%CI: 0.05; 0.14). The probability of PHC being cost-effective by 12 months was close to 65%, at willingness to pay a threshold of AUD$50,000 per quality-adjusted life year.
Conclusion: Benefits of PHC to patients and the health system at 12 months translated to a gain in quality-adjusted life years with a non-significant cost difference between the intervention and control groups. Given the relatively high set-up costs of the PHC intervention, the program may need to be offered to a larger population to achieve cost-effectiveness. Long-term follow-up is required to assess the real health and economic benefits over time.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Mudiyanselage et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)