Social Involvement of Critical and Emergency Medicine, CTS-609 Research Group, Hospital de Poniente, Spain.
Management Unit, Hospital de Poniente, Spain.
J Telemed Telecare. 2022 Jul;28(6):436-444. doi: 10.1177/1357633X20942044. Epub 2020 Jul 28.
Asynchronous teledermatology (TD) has undergone exponential growth in the past decade, allowing better diagnosis. Moreover, it saves both cost and time and reduces the number of visits involving travel and opportunity cost of time spent on visits to the hospital. The present study performed a cost-saving analysis of TD units and assessed whether they offered a cheaper alternative to conventional monitoring (CM) in hospitals from the perspective of public health-care systems (PHS) and patients.
This study was a retrospective assessment of 7030 patients. A cost-saving analysis comparing TD units to CM for patients at the Hospital de Poniente was performed over a period of one year. The TD network covered the Hospital de Poniente reference area (Spain) linked to 37 primary care (PC) centres that belonged to the Poniente Health District of Almeria.
We observed a significant cost saving for TD units compared to participants in the conventional follow-up group. From the perspective of a PHS, there was a cost saving of 31.68% in the TD group (€18.59 TD vs. €27.20 CM) during the follow-up period. The number of CM visits to the hospital reduced by 38.14%. From the patients' perspective, the costs were lower, and the cost saving was 73.53% (€5.45 TD vs. €20.58 CM).
The cost-saving analysis showed that the TD units appeared to be significantly cheaper compared to CM.
在过去十年中，异步远程皮肤病学（TD）呈指数级增长，从而能够更好地进行诊断。此外，它还节省了成本和时间，减少了因旅行而需要就诊的次数，以及患者在医院就诊时所花费的机会成本。本研究从公共医疗保健系统（PHS）和患者的角度对 TD 单位进行了成本节约分析，并评估了它们是否为医院常规监测（CM）提供了更经济的替代方案。
这是一项对 7030 名患者的回顾性评估。对 Poniente 医院的患者进行了为期一年的 TD 单位与 CM 的成本节约分析。TD 网络覆盖了 Poniente 医院参考区域（西班牙），与 37 个初级保健（PC）中心相连，这些中心属于 Almeria 的 Poniente 卫生区。
与常规随访组的参与者相比，我们观察到 TD 单位具有显著的成本节约。从 PHS 的角度来看，TD 组在随访期间节省了 31.68%的费用（TD 为 18.59 欧元，CM 为 27.20 欧元）。到医院进行 CM 就诊的次数减少了 38.14%。从患者的角度来看，成本更低，节省了 73.53%（TD 为 5.45 欧元，CM 为 20.58 欧元）。
成本节约分析表明，与 CM 相比，TD 单位似乎明显更便宜。
