Patient Engagement Reduces Costs Among Crohn’s Patients

According to a presentation at the 2016 Advances in IBD Conference, a joint-venture patient engagement program helped to reduce relative risk and treatment costs among patients with Crohn’s disease.

The researchers studied the effectiveness of Project Sonar, a community-based registry and disease management program developed jointly by the Illinois Gastroenterology Group (and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois which aimed to improve clinical and economic outcomes in inflammatory bowel disease.

“Project Sonar represents an innovative model of population health and shows trends towards improvements in the relative risk assessment, and reduction in health care resource utilization,” Lawrence Kosinski, MD, a gastroenterologist at Sonar MD, and colleagues wrote. “This study reports performance of Project Sonar in a subset of continuously enrolled patients with Crohn’s Disease.”

In order to study the effectiveness of Project Sonar, the researchers analyzed 175 patients with Crohn’s disease enrolled in the program between September and November of 2014. Provider and diagnostic services, and relative risk of emergency department (ED) visits and hospitalizations were compared between a baseline comparison group and the Project Sonar group. 

Study results showed that relative risk reduced by 1.1% among the Project Sonar group, while relative risk increased by 2.2% in the comparison group. Furthermore, ED visits related to Crohn’s disease decreased 100% in the Project Sonar group, while the comparison group decreased 75%. 

Dr Kosinski and colleagues found that hospital admissions increased by 14.3% among the Project Sonar group compared to a 100% of increase in the comparison group. Moreover, Crohn’s hospital days increased by 62.3% in the intervention group compared to a 322.2% increase in the control group. The researchers also found that length of stay increased by 42.8% in the intervention group and 111.1% in the control group. 

The researchers suggested that participation in Project Sonar significantly reduced Crohn’s-related treatment spending. Admissions payments increased by 50.9% in the Project Sonar group (from $481 to $727), while admissions payments increased by 248.3% in the comparison group (from $287 to $999). 

Overall, the Project Sonar group experienced an increase in Crohn’s disease spending that was 9.3% lower than the comparison group.  —David Costill