Acute Team Odense (ATO) is a team of nurses with specialised training in acute care, who treat citizens in their own homes in the municipality of Odense, Denmark. ATO makes home visits to conduct, e.g., clinical assessments on behalf of general practitioners or administer intravenous (IV) treatment to citizens who do not require nor wish to be hospitalised.
In the study, we map the activities undertaken by ATO by using systematically collected registrations by the team’s nurses for each home visit. We then construct scenarios of the most likely activities that would have taken place in the healthcare system in case ATO had not existed. We base these scenarios on interviews with general practitioners, doctors at Odense University Hospital (OUH), paramedics at the ambulance services and control centre in the region of Southern Denmark, and nurses at the municipality of Odense. Finally, we quantify the healthcare system’s costs associated with each of these scenarios, which corresponds to the savings generated by ATO.
We find that the net societal cost associated with Acute Team Odense (ATO) is DKK 2.3m, which is 70% below the expenditure for ATO as they deliver value in terms of savings across the healthcare system and society at large. The savings amounts to DKK 2.3m in health economic savings and DKK 3m in socioeconomic savings. In addition, we show that there are other positive benefits of ATO beyond those quantified in our model, such as meeting citizens’ preference for treatment at home vs in a hospital, faster blood sample collection, more timely diagnosing, and more.
The main conclusions of our study are
The study is commissioned by Acute Team Odense (Akutteam Odense).
After we finalized our study, ATO performed their own supplementary analysis about the number of acute ambulant patients referred from Odense University Hospital (OUH) using register data. This analysis shows that 131 acute ambulant patients were referred to ATO from OUH in 2019, which is more than the seven that could be identified based on the systematically collected registrations by the team’s nurses that Copenhagen Economics had access to. This implies that the net societal cost of ATO is lower than outlined above. This supplementary analysis was carried out by ATO and the results and conclusions cannot be attributed to Copenhagen Economics. For further information, please contact Nina Andersen, nian@odense.dk
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