Economic aspects of outpatient rehabilitation--methods and results of a study about economic efficiency of outpatient rehabilitation in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

Abstract

Since the recent changes in the German social code the outpatient rehabilitation system gains importance. While more and more studies investigate the medical outcomes of outpatient rehabilitation, the economic effects have hardly been examined so far. This article first presents fundamental methods to use for economic evaluation of outpatient rehabilitation and subsequently outlines the findings of a project comparing the economic effects of outpatient and inpatient rehabilitation in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The study statistically covers the total population of applicants for orthopaedic-traumatologic rehabilitation who are suitable for outpatient rehabilitation. A randomized and controlled study, it investigates outcome parameters of the two variants of rehabilitation compared. If the results are approximately equal, the differences between amounts and periods of payments and costs for the pension insurance agency are analyzed. And in fact, the results obtained so far from the investigation confirm that, in suitable patients, outpatient rehabilitation can achieve approximately the same outcomes as inpatient rehabilitation - but at distinctly lower costs. Although in the short term (i. e., at the end of treatment) outcome levels are somewhat lower, better results found even one year later however indicate a more sustained effect.