Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

SARDs are a group of inflammatory arthritis disorders (including lupus) affecting muscles, joints, and nearly every body system. Life span and quality are reduced by serious damage to the lungs, brain, heart, blood vessels and kidneys that frequently occurs, and the toxic effects of their immunosuppressive therapies. Thus, SARDs are believed quite costly to the healthcare system, but the long-term costs of these chronic disorders, and what influences them, are not well known. We will access 16 years of anonymous medical claims (including outpatient visits & tests, hospitalizations, and all prescriptions) for all adult SARD patients in BC, no matter where they live, to calculate their medical costs over time. To determine the extra healthcare costs from SARDs, we will compare these costs to those for a similar group of BC residents without SARDs. The physical manifestations of SARDs mean patients frequently are limited in their ability to participate in childcare, domestic activities and paid work during their prime reproductive and career years. In fact, many SARD patients become unable to work within 2 years of diagnosis, barring further career advancement and eliminating a source of retirement savings, extended health benefits, socialization and self-esteem. The financial implications for patients, families and the entire Canadian economy are huge, but underappreciated, and what drives these costs is unknown. We will directly survey a sample of the same BC SARD patients about their quality-of-life, and time they are less, or completely unable, to work or perform other activities, and link this data to their health claims data to quantify the total economic burden of SARDs. Our estimates should raise the profile of SARDs in Canada and help policymakers allocate scarce government resources to deliver care more efficiently and make informed decisions about new therapies, to reduce costs, keep patients working, and help preserve their health and quality-of-life