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Is critical care ready for an economic surrogate endpoint?

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Abstract

Intensive care is expensive, and thus a body of research has focused on strategies to reduce its costs. However, efforts to reduce the total cost of intensive care have met with limited success, partly because of the challenges of calculating how much a day in the ICU actually costs. We discuss these challenges and introduce the concept of total cost savings as an outcome of critical care trials, assuming statistically negative effects on mortality and quality of life.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medicine, University Health Network, Toronto Western Hospital, 399 Bathurst Street, Room 411M 2nd Floor McLaughlin Wing, Toronto, ON, M5T 2S8, Canada

    M Elizabeth Wilcox

  2. Interdepartmental Division of Critical Care, University of Toronto, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Room D503, Toronto, ON, M4N 3M5, Canada

    M Elizabeth Wilcox & Gordon D Rubenfeld

  3. Department of Critical Care Medicine and Sunnybrook Research Institute, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Room D108C, Toronto, ON, M4N 3M5, Canada

    Gordon D Rubenfeld

Authors
  1. M Elizabeth Wilcox
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  2. Gordon D Rubenfeld
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Correspondence to Gordon D Rubenfeld.

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Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

See related research by Turunen et al., http://ccforum.com/content/19/1/67

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Wilcox, M.E., Rubenfeld, G.D. Is critical care ready for an economic surrogate endpoint?. Crit Care 19, 248 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-015-0947-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-015-0947-0

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