Persons seeking physician care and requiring hospitalization are likely to have more severe disease and this information provides an overview of more serious cases. These costs derive from over 17,000 paid physician services and 172 hospitalized cases due to chickenpox alone each year. Herpes zoster contributes substantially to the overall costs associated with illness due to varicella-zoster virus. Each year there are an additional 17,000 paid physician services and 524 cases hospitalized due to herpes zoster alone. It should be noted that a chart review was not conducted to ascertain the validity of coding, and that prolonged hospital stays with herpes zoster may have been due to other causes in otherwise elderly or chronically ill persons.
Results indicate that adults who develop chickenpox are at higher risk of serious illness.
Although chickenpox is generally considered a benign disease of childhood, these data again emphasize the population impact and costs of this disease, particularly among children. This corresponds with the expected age distribution of chickenpox activity in the B.C. population with peak reports via CDSS in this same category. Physician billing records provide good data on the use of health services, but may be less useful for ascertaining diagnoses. Billing diagnoses may differ from those in clinic charts and physician costs based on billing diagnoses may be underestimated. Multiple complications seen during a single visit result in only one MSP claim submitted and only one ICD-9 code can be assigned to a single MSP claim.