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Healthcare Cost of Cochlear Implantation in India

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Indian Journal of Otolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Making evidence-based policy decisions is challenging when there is a lack of information, especially when deciding provider payment rates for publicly funded health insurance plans. Therefore, the goal of this study was to estimate the cost of a cochlear implant operation in a tertiary care setting in India. We also looked at the patients’ out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses for the cochlear implant surgery. From the perspectives of the patients and the healthcare systems, we assessed the financial costs of the cochlear implantation procedure. A bottom-up pricing model was used to assess the cost that the healthcare system would bear for a cochlear implant procedure. Information on all the resources (both capital and ongoing) required to offer cochlear implantation services for hearing loss was gathered over the course of a year. 120 individuals with hearing loss who had cochlear implantation surgery disclosed their out-of-pocket (OOP) costs, which included both direct medical and non-medical expenses. All costs for the budgetary year 2018–2019 were anticipated. The unit health system spent ₹ 151($2), ₹ 578($7.34) and ₹ 37,449($478) on ear exams, audiological evaluations, and cochlear implant surgeries, respectively. Per bed-day in the otolaryngology ward, hospitalization cost ₹ 202($2.6), or ₹ 1211($15.5). The estimated average out-of-pocket cost for a cochlear implant operation was ₹ 682,230($8710). Our research can be used to establish package rates for publicly funded insurance plans in India, plan the growth of public sector hearing care services, and do cost-effectiveness assessments on various hearing care models.

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Data Availability

Data supporting the results will be available upon request from the corresponding author. The data is not accessible to the public because of confidentiality and ethical restrictions.

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Acknowledgements

The work stated here is research work done under funded project of Department of health and research and the principal investigator was Dr Anuradha. Further, we would like to thank all the subjects who participated in the present research work.

Funding

This Project received specific grants from Department of health and research, Indian council of medical research, New Delhi, India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Otolaryngology, Speech and Hearing Unit, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, 160012, India

    Anuradha Sharma, Ravinder Thakur, Rajwinder Kaur, Sanjay Munjal & Naresh Panda

  2. Department of Community Medicine, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India

    Shankar Prinja, Dharna Gupta & Sameer Sharma

Authors
  1. Anuradha Sharma
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  2. Shankar Prinja
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  3. Ravinder Thakur
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  4. Dharna Gupta
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  5. Rajwinder Kaur
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  6. Sameer Sharma
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  7. Sanjay Munjal
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  8. Naresh Panda
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Contributions

Conceptualization: AS and SP; Data curation: AS; Formal analysis: SS and DG; Funding Acquisition: AS; Investigation: RT and RK; Methodology: AS and NP; Project Administration: AS, RT and RK; Resources: AS, RT, RK, SS and DG; Software: None; Supervision: AS and SP; Validation: None; Visualization: AS and SP; Writing original draft: AS, RT, RK and DG; Writing review and editing: AS, SP, SM and NP.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anuradha Sharma.

Ethics declarations

Ethics Approval

The Institute ethics committee granted the ethical approval (based on Helsinki Declarartion of 1975, as revised in 2008) and assigned it a reference number XXXXXXXX. Before information about OOP was obtained, the parents gave their Informed consent and approval. The participants were made aware that discontinuing the study at any stage would not have any adverse effects on their medical care.

Conflict of interest

There is no conflict of interest. I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

Disclosure

The Authors hereby certify that the work shown here is genuine, original and not submitted anywhere, either in part or full. All the necessary permissions from the patient, hospital and institution has been taken for submitting to neurology India”.

Blinded for review

The study and the data have been blinded for unbiased comments from reviewers.

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This work published has been a part of Department of health and research funded study. All the authors mentioned have been either principal investigator, co- Principal investigators, junior research fellow and senior research fellow in the study. They have all contributed immensely toward the completion of the study.

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Sharma, A., Prinja, S., Thakur, R. et al. Healthcare Cost of Cochlear Implantation in India. Indian J Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg 76, 1716–1723 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12070-023-04389-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12070-023-04389-7

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