Article Text
Abstract
Objective To analyse the financial costs from sports injuries among inpatients and emergency department (ED) patients aged 5–18 with a focus on Medicaid patients.
Methods Fixed-effects linear regression was used to assess the association of patient factors with cost of injury from sports. Florida Agency for Health Care Administration data from 2010 to 2014 were used, which included all inpatient and ED patients aged 5–18 years who had a sports injury.
Results Over 5 years, sports injuries in Florida youth cost $24 million for inpatient care and $87 million for ED care. Youth averaged $6039 for an inpatient visit and $439 for an ED visit in costs from sports injuries. Sports injuries for Medicaid-insured youth cost $10.8 million for inpatient visits and $44.2 million for ED visits.
Conclusion Older athletes and males consistently have higher healthcare costs from sports. Baseball, basketball, bike riding, American football, roller-skating/skateboarding and soccer are sports with high costs for both ED patients and inpatients and would benefit from prevention programmes. Injuries from non-contact sport participants are few but can have high costs. These athletes could benefit from prevention programmes as well.
- youth
- sports
- injury
- costs
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Footnotes
Contributors JLR, BLO and EEP all substantially contributed to the conception of the work and analysis of data. JLR drafted the work, and BLO and EEP critically revised it. All authors approved the final submission and agree to be accountable.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement statement Neither patients nor the public were involved with this research.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval The data sets are de-identified and publicly available, making this research exempt from an institutional review board review.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.