High-Quality Hospital Status on Health Care Costs for Pediatric Congenital Heart Disease Care for U.S. Military Beneficiaries

Abstract

ABSTRACT Introduction Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common and resource demanding birth defect managed in the United States, with approximately 40,000 children undergoing CHD surgery year. Researchers have compared high-volume to low-volume hospitals and found significant hospital-level variation in major complications, health resource utilization, and health care costs after CHD surgery. Materials and Methods Using nationwide representative claim data from the United States Military Health System from 2016 to 2020, TRICARE beneficiaries diagnosed with CHD were tabulated based on ICD-10 codes (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision). We examined the relationships between total costs and total hospitalizations costs post 1-year CHD diagnosis and presence or absence of High-Quality Hospital (HQH) designation. We applied both the naive generalized linear model (GLM) to control for the observed patient and hospital characteristics and the 2-stage least squares (2SLS) model to account for the unobserved confounding factors. This study was approved by University of Maryland, College Park Institutional Review Board (IRB) (Approval Number: 1576246-2). Results A relationship between HQH designation and total CHD related costs was not seen across 2SLS model specifications (marginal effect; −$41,579; 95% CI, −$83,429 to $271). For patients diagnosed with a moderate-complex or single ventricle CHD, the association of HQH status was a statistically significant reduction in total costs (marginal effect; −$84,395; 95% CI, −$140,560 to −$28,229) and hospitalization costs (marginal effect; −$73,958; 95% CI, −$121,878 to −$26,039). Conclusions It is very imperative for clinicians and patient support advocates to urge policymakers to deliberate the establishment of a quality designation authority for CHD management. These efforts will not only help to identify and standardize quality care metrics but to improve long-term health, effectiveness, and equity in the management of CHD. Furthermore, these efforts can be used to navigate patients to proven HQH, thereby improving care and reducing associated treatment costs for CHD patients.