If a nurse in the emergency room asks whether you want a hepatitis C test, new research suggests that saying yes is worthwhile. An economic analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Oct. 19 found that offering the test to all emergency department patients, regardless of risk, was cost-effective compared with testing only higher-risk patients or not testing in the ER at all.
The researchers used data from the DETECT Hep C trial, which included 147,498 patients at the emergency departments of Denver Health Medical Center, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. Universal testing cost about $12,820 for each quality-adjusted life-year gained, a measure of years lived in good health. That is well below the $100,000 threshold the team used to define cost-effectiveness.
