ArticleJournal of primary care & community health
Economic Analysis of Specialist Referral Patterns in Mackay, Queensland Following HealthPathways Implementation.
Article in Journal of primary care & community health. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Improving the timeliness of care for regional lung cancer patients through the implementation of a web-based lung cancer referral pathway.Internal medicine journal · 2025Article
- Clinicians' Experiences and Perspectives about a New Lung Cancer Referral Pathway in a Regional Health Service.International journal of integrated careArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionHealthPathways is a clinical information portal developed in New Zealand that enables general practitioners to manage and refer their patients in a local context. We analyzed specialist outpatient appointment costs in Mackay, Queensland before and after HealthPathways implementation.
methodsWe retrospectively examined specialist outpatient costs for patients referred by Mackay general practitioners for conditions with varying levels of HealthPathways implementation. Ranked from most clinical pathways available to none, chronic diabetes, cardiology, respiratory, and urology visits from January to March 2015, pre-pathways, and January to March 2017, post-pathways, were assessed. Monte Carlo simulation was used to estimate cost changes. Per-visit costs were multiplied by visit numbers to estimate policy impact.
resultsThe mean cost per visit increased from $220 to $305 for diabetes and $270 to $323 for respiratory, and decreased from $296 to $257 for cardiology and $444 to $293 for urology. The policy impact for each disease group over 3 months after accounting for visit numbers was a likely saving of $30 360 for diabetes and $10 270 for cardiology, and a likely cost increase of $24 449 for respiratory and $20 536 for urology.
conclusionsWe observed that conditions with more comprehensive clinical pathways cost Mackay HHS substantially less following implementation. Costs for low and no pathway implementation referrals increased slightly over the same period.
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