Identifying a Clinically and Economically Sound Strategy in the Treatment of CDI
November is C. difficile awareness month. In the light of this event, COMBACTE will highlight the work that is being done in COMBACTE-CDI: C. difficile Infections. We spoke to Dr. Sebastian Wingen-Heimann, a research associate in the working group “Cohorts in Infectious Research” at the University Hospital of Cologne, Germany, and part of the Project Management Office of COMBACTE-CDI.
Dr. Sebastian Wingen-Heimann's research is focused on health-economic evaluations of healthcare associated infections. In his blog, he speaks about the importance of health-economic findings for the management of CDI, especially for CDI recurrences.
“CDI is one of the leading healthcare associated infections. Several recently published studies reported the health-economic burden of CDI but to date no pan-European data exists. COMBACTE-CDI is the perfect platform to bridge the gap of lacking information. Personally, it was a challenge to develop a stringent methodology for bringing economic values from 12 different European countries towards one level. For example, 100 EURO spent for healthcare in Spain is not comparable with 100 EURO spent in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, we found a very good way to ensure comparability between the participating countries by further development of OECD data.
As an outlook of our main health-economic results of COMBACTE-CDI, the importance and significantly higher costs of recurrent CDI episodes during a 6 months follow up period must be noted. Our analyses demonstrated that patients with CDI recurrence had a 3.5 fold prolonged overall hospital length of stay compared to a patient with a single episode of CDI. This prolonged hospitalization results in almost 4 fold higher overall costs”.
“Our health-economic results of COMBACTE-CDI are an important message for clinicians and decision makers to be aware and prevent severe and recurrent CDI episodes. Especially in times of limited resources and budget restrictions, it is indispensable to identify a clinically and economically sound strategy in the treatment of CDI. I am really happy that the healthcare industry and academic investigators realized that fruitful project and I am looking forward on future successful collaborations.”
Related updates
Reflecting on COMBACTE-CDI
November is Clostridioides difficile Awareness Month
