Home enteral nutrition reduces complications, length of stay, and health care costs: results from a multicenter study

Background: Home enteral nutrition (HEN) has always been recognized as a life-saving procedure, but with the ongoing economic crisis influencing health care, its cost-effectiveness has been questioned recently. Objective: The unique reimbursement situation in Poland enabled the otherwise ethically unacceptable, hence unavailable, comparison of the period of no-feeding and long-term feeding and the subsequent analyses of the clinical value of the latter and its costeffectiveness. Design: The observational multicenter study in the group of 456 HEN patients [142 children: 55 girls and 87 boys, mean (6SD) age 8.7 6 5.9 y; 314 adults: 151 women and 163 men, mean age 59.3 6 19.8 y] was performed between January 2007 and July 2013. Two 12-mo periods were compared. During the first period, patients were tube fed a homemade diet and were not monitored; during the other period, patients received HEN. HEN included tube feeding and complex monitoring by a nutrition support team. The number of complications, hospital admissions, length of hospital stay, biochemical and anthropometric variables, and costs of hospitalization were compared. Results: Implementation of HEN enabled weight gain and stabilized liver function in both age groups, but it hardly influenced the other tests. HEN implementation reduced the incidence of infectious complications (37.4% compared with 14.9%; P McN , 0.001), the number of hospital admissions [1.98 6 2.42 (mean 6 SD) before and 1.26 6 2.18 after EN; P W , 0.001], and length of hospital stay (39.7 6 71.9 compared with 11.9 6 28.5 d; P W , 0.001). The mean annual costs ($) of hospitalization were reduced from 6500.20 6 10,402.69 to 2072.58 6 5497.00. Conclusions: The study showed that HEN improves clinical outcomes and decreases health care costs. It was impossible, however, to determine precisely which factor mattered more: the artificial diet itself or the introduction of complex care. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02122120. Am J Clin Nutr doi: 10. 3945/ajcn.113.082842.