SFEIES24 Poster Presentations Bone & Calcium (20 abstracts)
1Ibex Innovations Ltd, Sedgefield, United Kingdom; 2Macanda, Stockholm, Sweden; 3Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; 4Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, United Kingdom; 5University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom
Background: Fragility fractures lead to considerable societal costs and individual suffering. Despite the availability of cost-effective treatments for high-risk patients, a significant treatment gap exists, with many high-risk individuals remaining unidentified and untreated. The aim of this study was to evaluate the cost-effectiveness and impact of opportunistic screening for bone health with IBEX BH, a software solution that provides areal bone mineral density from wrist Digital Radiographs, in a United Kingdom general radiography setting.
Methods: The study used a health economic model that compared the health outcomes and costs of screening with IBEX BH vs usual care for men and women aged 50 and older who had a forearm radiograph for any reason at Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust. The model incorporated data on fracture incidence, fracture risk reduction, mortality, quality of life, and fracture and treatment costs from published sources and extracts from the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust database. Costs and health outcomes in terms of quality-adjusted life years were simulated over the lifetime of patients. The analysis took an NHS and personal social services perspective.
Results: The results showed that screening with IBEX BH was associated with a gain of 0.004 quality-adjusted life years and a cost saving of £63 per patient compared with usual care, making it a dominant (cost-saving) strategy. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of the results under various assumptions.
Conclusions: IBEX BH could be a cost-effective tool for early identification and prevention of fragility fractures at Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, potentially addressing the current challenges of low provision of fracture risk assessment and, therefore, the osteoporosis treatment gap.