Dr Karl Kilgore Discusses Benefits of CAR T-Cell Therapy for Medicare Patients

Medicare patients' health care utilization, including hospitalizations and emergency department visits, decreased after CAR T-cell therapy, said Karl Kilgore, PhD, senior research analyst at Avalere Health.

Transcript:

For Medicare beneficiares treated with CAR T-cell therapies, how did cost change before and after treatment?

In our sample of patients who got who got CAR T therapy, we looked at 6 months prior to CAR T and 6 months after. We looked at all costs, health care costs, pre and post, exclusive of the cost of CAR T itself. And we saw all costs decrease by 17%, post versus pre.

How were patients treated with CAR T-cell therapy cared for after receiving the treatment? What outcomes did they have?

We don't have a lot of information on the care itself. But in broad terms, we looked at healthcare utilization before and after. Specifically, we looked at hospitalizations and length of stay, and we look at emergency department visits. We found, for the population as a whole, that hospitalizations decreased by a significant margin and length of stay, or total days in the hospital, decreased by 17%, pre versus post. Emergency department visits were even more striking. The incidence of an emergency department visit, that is number of patients going to the emergency room, decreased by a third. Total emergency department visits, again for the entire population, decreased by nearly half after CAR T versus before.