Valuing innovative endoscopic techniques: hemostatic powder for the treatment of GI tumor bleeding.

Background and Aims: Access to new endoscopic treatment modalities often depends on price. To resolve this gap and therefore help to ensure that care delivery can occur on a clinical basis, we aimed to establish the value to insurers of novel hemostatic powder to treat GI tumor bleeding.
Methods: A decision-analytic model developed to assess the impact of endoscopic intervention on the risk of 30-day readmission for GI bleeding from an insurer perspective was adapted to assess GI tumor bleeding with hemostatic powder or standard endoscopic therapy. Costs were derived from Medicare populations. Outcomes were derived from a recent multicenter randomized clinical trial.
Results: Costs ranged from $651 to $1613 to treat upper GI tumor bleeding and from $531 to $1014 to treat lower GI tumor bleeding based on risk reduction in 30-day hospital readmission for recurrent bleeding. These valuations should represent medical device and incremental facility costs in addition to incremental physician and staff time.
Conclusions: Coverage for novel endoscopic hemostatic powder therapy seems cost-saving to insurers.
Competing Interests: Disclosure The following authors disclosed financial relationships: R. Law: consultant for Boston Scientific, Medtronic, and Conmed; research support from Olympus America, Boston Scientific, and WL Gore; and royalties from UpToDate. E.D. Shah: consultant for Cook outside of the scope of this work, and for Ardelyx, Mahana, Mylan, Neuraxis, Salix, Sanofi, and Takeda. Dr Shah is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (K23DK134752).
(Copyright © 2024 American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)