Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is associated with substantial healthcare spending, but quantifying these expenses has been limited to cohorts of self-selected patients or assessments of insurance claims for major healthcare events. Leveraging the 21(st) Century Cures Act, which mandated reporting hospital-level service, we pursued a comprehensive evaluation of healthcare spending in a diverse cohort of individuals with T2D. METHODS: We designed a pragmatic, observational cohort study of patients with T2D seeking regular care (≥ 1 visit/2 years) across 5 hospitals and an outpatient network (2013-2023) in the Yale New Haven Health System. We used the chargemaster file to extract Medicare and insurance-negotiated cash prices for all healthcare events. We used residential zip codes to define median household income based on US Census data. We also examined the prevalence of financial hardship, defined by health expenses >20% of income, and identified its predictors using multivariable logistic regression. All values were assessed as 2023 US$. Key cohorts were defined across strata with and without atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) and/or heart failure (HF) before or up to 1 year after the T2D diagnosis. RESULTS: Overall, 106,881 patients with T2D followed for a median of 5.4 years (IQR: 3.1-7.5) had 2,258,376 healthcare visits, representing $3.56 billion in expected healthcare expenses. Annualized expected expenses among those without ASCVD/HF were $444 (147-4,471), compared with $2,930 (209-13,240) among those with ASCVD/HF. Across cohorts, 9-29% of patients with T2D had healthcare expenses above the threshold for financial hardship. Compared with White patients, Black and Hispanic patients were more likely, and Asians were less likely to have financial hardship (aOR: Black, 1.81 [1.73-1.91]; Hispanic, 1.39 [1.31-1.48]; Asian, 0.46 [0.37-0.57]). CONCLUSION: A digital, individualized, expense-linked T2D registry showed that patients with (vs without) cardiovascular comorbidities had substantially higher medical expenses, with 1 in 5 facing financial hardship.