OBJECTIVES:

To assess the impact on resources consumption and health outcomes of the patient support programme (PSP) Abbvie Care 2.0 Immunology in Spain.

METHODS:

A cost-consequence analysis was designed in Excel to estimate differences following the implementation of Abbvie Care 2.0 in patients with immune-mediated chronic diseases along a 1-year time horizon.

The hospital perspective was used to collect inputs related to health outcomes and resource consumption in 2 different situations: without and with PSP implementation, for each patient group; rheumatic (rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis), dermatologic (psoriasis, hidradenitis suppurativa) and gastrointestinal (ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease)

The collected resources included annual number of hospital professional visits (clinician, nurse and pharmacist) and average visit duration, annual number of emergency visits and disease-related hospital admissions. Health outcomes comprised adherence, persistence, activation (measured with PAM-10 questionnaire) and programme satisfaction for patients and professionals.

An expert panel of pharmacists from 6 public hospitals validated and collected data.

Unitary costs (€, 2017) for resources derived from local databases.

RESULTS:

For an hypothetical cohort of patients (41.7% rheumatic, 24.0% dermatologic and 34.4% gastrointestinal immunologic diseases), the PSP implementation was associated to reduction in routine visits to physician (-13.1%), hospital pharmacy (-33.4%) and specialized nursery (-9.4%) as well as visit duration (-5.6%, -6.4% and -10.9%, respectively)

Additional incidence-related visits decreased also in annual number -5.3% (physician), -12.1% (pharmacy), -14.5% (nurse), and duration, which joined to reduction in emergency visits (-59.1%) and hospital admissions (-84.5%) were associated to average cost-savings of €3,578.25 patient/year.

Abbvie Care 2.0 implementation increased drug adherence (1.6%) and 6-months persistence (10.3%) and patient activation (2.8% of PAM-10-Total score improvement).

The average PSP-satisfaction reported-scores reached 9.66/10 for patients and 8/10 for professionals.

CONCLUSIONS:

Abbvie Care 2.0 contributes to reduce burden of hospital visits, being associated to cost-savings and improvement in health outcomes with high satisfaction-levels scores.