Problem: The POPI trial was a randomised control trial in South London estimating the incidence of pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) and the potential impact of screening for chlamydial infection on preventing PID. The study group wanted to know the costs to the health care system of managing PID, and what cost savings could be made through chlamydia screening.

Approach: We worked with the study team to define the question based on the data they had already collected during the trial, and then developed a strategy to answer it. This involved extracting data from patient notes and building a simple model in Excel to estimate the costs of care for women with PID. National costs were applied to local data, and we scaled up the results to estimate the potential cost savings, both locally and nationally.

 Impact: This work provided estimates of the cost of managing PID, which are useful to groups exploring the impact of delivering care to these patients and also for those wishing to explore the impact of interventions to avoid PID such as chlamydia screening. The results were published in Sexually Transmitted Infections, and has been cited many times in prestigious journals and authoritative reports and used in two modelling studies.

 

Testimonial

“Dr Adams is an excellent health economist, very clear thinking and easy to work with. She has original ideas and delivers on time. She designed the cost analysis for our trial, supervised the research assistant who assembled the relevant data and enabled publication in a high ranking journal.”

• Dr Pippa Oakeshott, Professor of General Medicine, St Georges University

 

Related publications

Aghaizu A, Adams EJ, Turner KME, et al. What is the cost of pelvic inflammatory disease and how much could be prevented by screening for Chlamydia trachomatis? Cost analysis of the POPI (prevention of pelvic infection) trial. Sex Transm Infect 2011; 87:312-317.