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Michelle Tew, PhD Candidate, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of MelbourneAbstract: Patient-reported outcomes are important measures of clinical care and surgical outcomes. As these measures are increasingly integrated into clinical practice, there is also a need to translate collected data into valuable information to better understand patients’ health trajectories and improve the value of surgical care. Furthermore, the growing evidence of quality-of-life (QoL) as an important predictor of outcomes suggests that a better understanding of patients’ QoL trajectories can reveal important information on disease progression.

Using data from a registry cohort of patients undergoing total knee replacement (TKR) surgery, this study aims to identify unique QoL trajectory groups using latent class growth analysis and to examine patient characteristics of identified trajectories. There appears to be important unobserved heterogeneity in QoL trajectories in patients undergoing TKR. Associating QoL trajectories with patient characteristics can help identify subgroups for whom TKR may be of higher or lower value, thus facilitate the rational deployment of TKR to those who stand to benefit the most while targeting others for more appropriate non-surgical intervention.

Biography: Michelle Tew is a PhD Candidate and Research Assistant at the Centre for Health Policy, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. She completed her postgraduate training in Public Health specialising in Health Economics and Economic Evaluation at the University of Melbourne and in Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham. Since 2015, she has worked on a number of costing studies including analysing costs associated with Caesarean section for overweight women and in the implementation of a sepsis protocol pathway. She has worked with large datasets, in particular with BreastScreen Victoria data, and contributed to a return on investment study for the Victorian Department of Health. She is also part of the team providing economic evaluation for the Medical Services Advisory Committee (MSAC) at the Department of Health to inform decisions about listing of new Medicare items.