Health Economic Impact of a Multicenter Quality-of-Care Initiative for Reducing Unplanned Healthcare Utilization...

A multicenter adult inflammatory bowel disease learning health system (IBD Qorus) implemented clinical care process changes for reducing unplanned emergency department visits and hospitalizations using a Breakthrough Series Collaborative approach.

Using Markov decision models, we determined the health economic impact of participating in the Collaborative from the third-party payer perspective.

Across all 23 sites, participation in the Collaborative was associated with lower annual costs by an average of $2,528 ± $233 per patient when compared with the baseline period.

Implementing clinical care process changes using a Collaborative approach was associated with overall cost savings. Future work should examine which specific interventions are most effective and whether such cost savings are sustainable.