Hospital Resource Utilization and Costs in Patients with Heart Failure in France

Heart failure (HF) is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, and economic burden on the healthcare system. The aim of this study was to estimate the current hospital resource utilization and costs for HF patients in France.

This retrospective cohort study included adult HF patients hospitalized in France between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019. Data related to sociodemographic characteristics, number and duration of hospital stays, use of medical procedures or expensive and innovative drugs/medical devices included in the "liste-en-sus", and comorbidities were retrieved from the French national hospital discharge database. Data were further stratified based on the presence or absence of cardiac decompensation, comorbidities, ejection fraction (EF) status, and incident/prevalent patients.

In 2019, a total of 430,544 patients were hospitalized in France with HF as a primary or associated diagnosis, with 51.9% male and 48.1% female and a mean age of 79.0 years. More than 75% of the study population was composed of prevalent HF patients. About 3.1% of patients were diagnosed with at least one event of cardiac decompensation during follow-up. Also, 20.2% and 9.9% of patients were identified with preserved and reduced EFs, respectively. The average number and length of hospital stays were 1.7 per patient and 10.4 days per patient, respectively. The annual cost of hospitalization for HF was €8341.3 per patient. Presence of cardiac decompensation at index date or during follow-up, reduced EF, and comorbidities were associated with numerically higher frequency and length of hospitalization, and hospitalization cost. For hospitalization and 'liste-en-sus' medical devices, higher cost was observed in incident than prevalent HF patients, while for 'liste-en-sus' drugs, higher cost was reported in prevalent than incident HF patients.

This study highlighted the high economic hospital burden of HF in France. More studies investigating different HF patient profiles must be conducted to help determine the main factors of hospital cost for HF.