What Happened to Older People after Surgical Repair of a Broken Hip and How Much Did it Cost?

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Australian Medicare expenditure will continue to increase at potentially an ever-increasing rate with more complex and expensive health care and an aging population. Older people are more prone to hip fractures. In 2013, there were 23,000 cases with direct health care costs estimated at $762 Million, which is forecast to reach 32,000 cases with a cost of over $1 billion by 2022. Of this, most are spent on hospital treatment but these expenditure estimates do not include informal community care and productivity loss due to fractures. Despite advances in perioperative care, the death rate remains high in the elderly after hip fracture surgery. In Australia, there unfortunately exists a gap in this regard, since local data on such outcomes are limited in literature. Up to date, only a handful of small studies reported death rates with little research on the “dollar”. Given that hip fracture imposes such heavy medico-economic burden on our health system and current evidence base is weak, particularly in relation to its financial implications, a recent editorial has called for more international large observational studies so that cost-effectiveness analysis is possible for this population. Since identifying risk factors (and then, risk adjustment) may improve patient outcomes, a pilot study was designed for patients over the age of 70 who underwent hip fracture surgery between July 2011 and July 2015 at a Victorian Metropolitan Hospital. This study intends to find out whether some variables are independent risk factors, being increased risk of death, greater hospital costs or both. After institutional ethics approval, the hospital Database identified 1163 eligible patients and their data were retrieved. The investigators will then break down these data and assess the impact of perioperative variables on the early (30-day) deaths and associated hospital costs. To achieve the study goals, it is necessary to clearly define those to-be-tested variables, since there exist diverse definitions for certain variables, for example, early surgery is recommended in the current guidelines, but its definition varies from 24h to 72h. This is unsatisfactory because such inconsistent definitions could lead to different interpretations, and thus, inconclusive results. Accordingly in this instance, delayed surgery will be defined as operations undertaken after 48h post orthopaedic admission and then to examine whether such delay causes more deaths and/or costs, if so, delayed surgery is an independent risk factor and should be avoided in future practice. This pilot study is expected to provide valuable local data on some potentially unfavorable perioperative variables and also to fill the gap by estimating associated hospital costs for each fracture. Based on this information, a future multi-center study should facilitate and guide further research into potentially modifiable variables that may reduce the death rates and/or hospital costs of elderly hip fractures

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