Injury-related health care utilization and costs among participants in a multifactorial falls prevention programme

Purpose Our study aims to retrospectively investigate injury-related specialized health care utilization and costs among primary health care patients participating in a multifactorial falls prevention programme (MFFP) compared with sex-, age-, and residence-matched population-based controls. Methods This is a Finnish single-centre observational, retrospective, register-based controlled cohort study including 527 community-dwelling primary health care MFFP patients and their 3:1 age-, sex-, and residence-matched population-based controls (n = 1581), who had not participated in the MFFP. Patients’ injury-related specialized health care utilization was followed from their first MFFP visit until death or the end of December 2019. Results MFFP patients had more injury-related outpatient visits [IRR 1.76 (95% CI 1.63 to 1.91)] and hospitalizations [IRR 1.88 (95% CI 1.76 to 2.01)] than the controls. Among those with injury-related specialized health care utilization, the costs per person-year were not significantly higher than in controls for outpatient visits [mean ratio 1.06 (95% CI 0.71 to 1.58)], hospitalizations [mean ratio 1.03 (95% CI 0.68 to 1.56)], or total costs [mean ratio 1.11 (95% CI 0.74 to 1.67)]. MFFP patients did not accumulate higher total specialized health care costs than their controls. Conclusion MFFP patients had more injury-related specialized health care utilization than matched controls, but the total injury-related costs were similar between groups.