Abstract 1026: The costs of waiting to get treated for new AML patients: Medical expenditures, mortality rate, and length of hospital stay

Introduction: We studied the association of waiting time from diagnostic Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) tests to initial treatment and medical expenditures, length of hospitalization, and survival rates for new AML patients. Method: We extracted 3,976 new AML patients from Optum’s de-identified Clinformatics࣪ Data Mart Database, a data warehouse of adjudicated commercial and medicare advantage claims. Their waiting days from standard diagnostic testings to the initial AML-specific treatment as the risk factor. Medical expenditures occurring within 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years after the index AML diagnosis was measured for the patients’ financial wellbeing, along with the survival rate and the length of hospital stay. We compared these outcomes for patients falling in each waiting time category. Different types of expenditures, including inpatient and outpatient costs for patients with different waiting lengths were compared. Results: For patients with moderate lengths of waiting time, medical expenditure and mortality rate increases and length of hospital stay decreased with waiting time. Within 2 years after the index AML diagnosis, the average expenditures per day goes from $4,803 for patients waiting for 0-2 days to $7,489 for patients waiting for 1-2 weeks, while the survival rate goes from 42.8% to 28.1% and the average length of stay goes from 45.6 days to 35.0 days. The increment in medical expenditure is mostly accounted for by outpatient costs, but is off-set by inpatient costs. The patterns for medical expenditure and survival rate reverse as waiting time becomes severe (3-4 weeks). Similar reverse is not observed for length of stay. Conclusion: The waiting time between AML diagnostic tests and initial treatments is associated with higher medical expenditure and higher mortality rate for moderate waiters. Our findings suggest that reducing waiting time has strong potential in improving AML patients’ survival and financial sustainability. Medical expenditure, survival rate, and length of hospital stay within 2 years by waiting time Medical expenditure per day ($) 2-yr Survival rate (%) Length of hospital stay (days) 28d 2224 51.0 35.0 Citation Format: Kang Lin Hsieh, Bor-Sheng Ko, Xiaoqian Jiang, Teng-Jen Chang, Yu-Fen Wang. The costs of waiting to get treated for new AML patients: Medical expenditures, mortality rate, and length of hospital stay [abstract]. In: Proc