The Direct Medical Care Costs Associated with Gastric Cancer in a Third-level Hospital in Iran

Abstract

Background: Approximately 20 million individuals with cancer are living in the world. Gastric cancer is the fourth leading cause of death in the world. The aim of this study was to evaluate the costs of direct medical care of gastric cancer patients in a tertiary teaching hospital in Iran. Methods: The present study is a descriptive-analytical, which has been done in two main stages. The first stage was done by the aim of designing a form based on the valid international guidelines. The second step was done to identify the costs of diagnosis and treatment of Gastric cancer. To analyze the costs data, descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation were utilized. According to the violation of the assumption of normalization of the data, nonparametric statistical tests such as Mann-Whitney, Wilcoxon and SPSS 16 were used for data analysis. Results: In this research, the records of 449 gastric cancer patients who referred to Omid tertiary teaching Hospital in Mashhad from the year 2005 to 2015 were studied. According to the results, the hospitalization costs has the highest average costs. Based on the signification level of the Mann Whitney test, no remarkable difference can be seen in the total costs of metastatic and non-metastatic patients (P-value: P> 0.05). Conclusion: In addition, new policies to reduce the heavy costs of these patients, which are performed by insurance agencies, financial supports from financial institution and charities and etc. can reduce the financial barriers for patients and prevent them from meeting catastrophic costs.

Keywords

• Direct Costs
• Gastric Cancer
• Hospital