The Return On Investment Saves Us All

 

Mobile health vans are core to providing vital front line preventative community health services to at risk people in underserved areas. Prevention is also key to cost reduction down the road and as such there is a need to make the case for the financial returns that these services provide for overall healthcare budgets.

On preview, it is difficult to readily see the return on investment into a mobile community health project, because the vans themselves as an accounting item do not bring in revenue. But this argument generally also applies to all prevention programs as the cost savings/cost recovery is realized some time down the road.

Where the cost savings in terms of prevention are most recognized are in the savings in emergency room visits as well as keeping long-term, chronic medical conditions from progressing to the point of hospitalization.

Generally speaking an ROI formula to measure a mobile community health van such as ours at Sanguen, is to figure that the return on investment is equal to the value of the van divided by the annual cost to run it; the savings in emergency room visits avoided as well as a value of quality-adjusted life years saved from these services).

This is especially so given that the client base served by our mobile community health vans are high-risk populations which are themselves high users of emergency department services.

We appreciate donations of every size and that the donations we receive go directly to the services for people we are serving

 

Long Term Savings

 

Our Hepatitis C treatment and testing outreach is such can example of money saved “down the road”.

Consider the following:

  • Average cost of a liver transplant is $121,732
  • Hepatitis C antibody test is $14.48
  • Hep C RNA/virus test is $100
  • Cost of treatment for hepatitis C is around $60,000-$65,000

Our mobile health vans also save emergency room visits with our Naloxone/Narcan kits handed out to at-risk clients in the community, plus providing related services. Considering a recent by Wellington Dufferin Guelph Public Health, which stated that Guelph’s opioid-related emergency room visits for 2017 were 37 per cent higher than the provincial average.

Source: https://www.guelphtoday.com/local-news/rate-of-opioid-related-emergency-room-visits-almost-doubles-in-guelph-1069915