Effect of health education based on Iranian Traditional Medicine (Hefz-Alsehe) on treatment costs of the Iranian Health Insurance Organization

 Lifestyle changes have reduced the physical and mental health of humans and increased burden and cost of treatment and subsequently created a problem for governments to provide treatment for their citizens. Therefore, we conducted this experimental study for examining the effect of hygiene education on the treatment costs for health insured patients with high cost (50 to 70 percentile).  This empirical study was conducted on two groups with the aim of examining hygiene education on health care insurance costs in Tehran, Iran in 2017. In this study, the intervention group received face-to-face and virtual hygiene education according to traditional Iranian medicine based on the health belief model. The control group did not receive any special training during the study period.  This study was conducted on 101 health insurers, including 50 men and 51 women in intervention and control groups. The two groups were similar in terms of demographic characteristics. The results showed significantly lower laboratory (-26.72%, -2.38%, P <0.001), drug (-23.64%, 3.88%, P <0.001), radiology (-27.92%, -5.02%, P < 0.001), visit (-30.52%, -16.16%, P <0.001) and total costs (-36.52%, -1.16%, P <0.001) for intervention group as compared with control group.  Results of the current study show that health education could be recommended as a proper way to control the cost of treatment.