Abstract
BackgroundThe interRAI-Home Care (interRAI-HC) instrument is commonly used in routine care to assess care and service needs, resource utilisation and health outcomes of community dwelling home care clients. Potentially, the interRAI-HC can also be used to calculate societal costs in economic evaluations. The purpose of this study was to assess the convergent validity of the interRAI-HC instrument in comparison with the RUD Lite instrument for the calculation of societal costs among care-dependent community dwelling older adults.MethodsA within-subject design was used. Participants were 65 years and older and received professional community care in five countries. The RUD Lite was administered by trained (research) nurses or self-reports within 4 weeks after the interRAI-HC assessment. Agreement between the interRAI-HC and RUD Lite estimates was assessed using Spearman’s correlation coefficients. We hypothesised that there was strong correlation (Spearman’s ρ > 0.5) between resource utilisation estimates, costs of care estimates and total societal cost estimates derived from both instruments.ResultsStrong correlation was found between RUD Lite and interRAI-HC resource utilisation assessments for eight out of ten resource utilisation items. Total societal costs according to the RUD Lite were statistically significantly lower than according to the interRAI-HC (mean difference €-804, 95 % CI −1340; −269). The correlation between the instruments for total societal costs and all six cost categories was strong.ConclusionsThe interRAI-HC has good convergent validity as compared with the RUD-Lite instrument to estimate societal cost of resource utilisation in community dwelling older adults. Since interRAI-HC assessments are part of routine care in many community care organisations and countries already, this finding may increase the feasibility of performing economic evaluations among community dwelling older adults.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1702-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The interRAI-Home Care instrument is commonly used in routine care to assess care and service needs, resource utilisation and health outcomes of community dwelling home care clients
Significant differences (p < 0.05) between participants across countries were found for age, living status, CPS, DRS, Activities of daily living (ADL), iADL, pain, multimorbidity and number of caregivers
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the convergent validity for societal cost of resource utilisation of an instrument that can be used in routine care, the interRAI-HC, as compared to a developed resource utilisation instrument, the Resource Utilization in Dementia (RUD) Lite
Summary
The interRAI-Home Care (interRAI-HC) instrument is commonly used in routine care to assess care and service needs, resource utilisation and health outcomes of community dwelling home care clients. The interRAI-HC can be used to calculate societal costs in economic evaluations. The purpose of this study was to assess the convergent validity of the interRAI-HC instrument in comparison with the RUD Lite instrument for the calculation of societal costs among care-dependent community dwelling older adults. Between 2010 and 2050, the proportion of adults aged 65 years and older is expected to increase from 8 to 16 % [2]. The demand for (long-term) formal and informal care services is expected to grow substantially in the coming decades, which will put heavy pressure on health care systems across Europe [2, 4]. Since budgets available for health care are limited, policy makers need to make decisions on how to allocate health care resources in the most efficient way
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