Private costs of patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a condition which frequently requires hospitalization and consequently, can result in high costs. Little is known of the additional personal resources that are used by patients hospitalized for CAP.

To measure the private costs for persons who were hospitalized with CAP for the 30 days after being admitted to hospital using a systematic method of measurement.

Potential personal cost items were identified by nurses familiar with the treatment of CAP and categorized. Using telephone interviews in conjunction with the cost-identification framework, 60 patients from the Edmonton, Alberta area were surveyed for their private costs associated with CAP for 30 days after admission to hospital.

Of the 60 patients surveyed, 49 were older than 65 years of age. The mean private cost was 505 dollars, which amounted to 5.6% of the total societal costs of 8,970 dollars. The distribution was skewed with a small number of patients that had high costs.

This method allows the determination of the societal costs for patients hospitalized with pneumonia, and the costs were not much greater than those to the health care system.