Key result
Clinical pathway management did not significantly decrease the mean length of hospitalization or total hospital costs compared to standard care in patients with acute complicated appendicitis.
Why the study?
Does clinical pathway management reduce hospitalization time and costs in patients with acute complicated appendicitis?
RCT (n=684)
Randomized
No
Does clinical pathway management reduce hospitalization time and costs in patients with acute complicated appendicitis?
Absolute Event Rate: 7% vs 7%
p-value: p=0.35
Implementation of a clinical pathway for acute complicated appendicitis did not significantly reduce hospitalization time or costs compared to standard care.
Clinical pathways offer no hospitalization or cost benefit in acute complicated appendicitis; challenges routine adoption and prior assumptions.
Clinical pathway (CP) is a medical management tool made by a group of medical specialists and specialized for certain diseases. It has been proved that CP was an efficient way to optimize the hospitalization management and control medical cost. In this paper, we focused on the effect of CP in the patients with acute complicated appendicitis via total duration of hospitalization, hospitalization time before operation, total cost of hospitalization and drug expenditure. From March 2014 to March 2015, the patients with conditions of appendicitis in Three Gorges Central Hospital of Wanzhou, Chongqing, were divided into CP group and non path control group to analyze the effect of the application of CP. Our data showed that there were no significant differences between two groups of patients in total duration of hospitalization, hospitalization time before operation, total cost of hospitalization and drug expenditure. The implementation of CP neither decreased the time of patients in hospital nor the total hospitalization cost. Besides, application of CP for acute appendicitis patients should distinguish between simple appendicitis and complicated appendicitis, simple appendectomy patients implement CP is beneficial, and patients with complicated appendicitis did not come from the benefit.
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Guo et al. (2016) conducted an RCT in Acute complicated appendicitis (n=684). Clinical pathway management vs. Non-pathway management (standard care) was evaluated on Mean length of hospitalization (days) (p=0.35). Clinical pathway management did not significantly decrease the mean length of hospitalization or total hospital costs compared to standard care in patients with acute complicated appendicitis.
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