Health Economic Evaluation of Antimicrobial Stewardship, Procalcitonin Testing, and Rapid Blood Culture Identification in Sepsis Care: A 90-Day Model-Based, Cost-Utility Analysis

We evaluated the cost-effectiveness of a bundled intervention including an antimicrobial stewardship program (ASP), procalcitonin (PCT) testing, and rapid blood culture identification (BCID), compared with pre-implementation standard care in critically ill adult patients with sepsis.

We conducted a decision tree model-based cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a previously published pre- and post-implementation quality improvement study. We adopted a public Canadian healthcare payer’s perspective. Two intensive care units in Alberta with 727 adult critically ill patients were included. Our bundled intervention was compared with pre-implementation standard care. We collected healthcare resource use and estimated unit costs in 2022 Canadian dollars (CAD) over a time horizon from study entry to hospital discharge or death. We calculated the incremental net monetary benefit (iNMB) of the intervention group compared with the pre-intervention group. The primary outcome was cost per sepsis case. Secondary outcomes included readmission rates, Clostridioides difficile infections, mortality, and lengths of stay. Uncertainty was investigated using cost-effectiveness acceptability curves, cost-effectiveness plane scatterplots, and sensitivity analyses.

Mean (standard deviation [SD]) cost per index hospital admission was CAD $83,251 ($107,926) for patients in the intervention group and CAD $87,044 ($104,406) for the pre-intervention group, though the difference ($3,793 [$7,897]) was not statistically significant. Costs were higher in the pre-intervention group for antibiotics, readmissions, and C. difficile infections. The intervention group had a lower mean expected cost; $110,580 ($108,917) compared with pre-intervention ($125,745 [$113,210]), with a difference of $15,165 ($8278). There were no statistically significant differences in quality adjusted life years (QALYs) between groups. The iNMB of the intervention group compared with pre-intervention was greater than $15,000 for willingness-to-pay (WTP) per QALY values of between $0 and $100,000. In our sensitivity analysis, the intervention was most likely to be cost-effective in roughly 56% of simulations at all WTP thresholds.

Our bundled intervention of ASP, PCT, and BCID among adult critically ill patients with sepsis was potentially cost-effective, but with substantial decision uncertainty.