Economic Evaluation Of Health Care Interventions Research Articles

Study of length of stay and average cost of treatment in Medicine Intensive Care Unit at tertiary care center

<b>Introduction:</b> In this era, health-care facilities have improved greatly which has increased the life expectancy of humanity, but all these costs and so the role of economic evaluations of health-care interventions has become increasingly important especially in developing countries like India. <b>Objective:</b> To estimate the expenses of a patient in Intensive Care Unit (ICU), disease wise expenditure and area of expenses (therapeutic and diagnostic). <b>Materials and Methods:</b> This prospective observational study was conducted in tertiary care hospital of private setup in Mumbai region. The inclusion criterion was admitted patients in medicine ICU (MICU) on the basis of the clinical presentation during January 2014–February 2014 (2 months). The cost of treatment included the bed charges in the hospital ICU, diagnostic cost (routine and special investigations), therapeutic cost, cost of oxygen, monitor, nebulization, ventilator, cost of drugs, and other consumables were assessed. <b>Results:</b> Totally fifty patients were admitted in above period to MICU. The average stay of a patient in MICU amounts to 4 days (approximated for 4.01) with the least being 1 day for unstable angina and maximum 11 days for congestive cardiac failure. <b>Conclusion:</b> The major shares of expenses in treatment in MICU were on medicines, and this can be reduced using generic drugs.

Designing and Undertaking a Health Economics Study of Digital Health Interventions.

This paper introduces and discusses key issues in the economic evaluation of digital health interventions. The purpose is to stimulate debate so that existing economic techniques may be refined or new methods developed. The paper does not seek to provide definitive guidance on appropriate methods of economic analysis for digital health interventions. This paper describes existing guides and analytic frameworks that have been suggested for the economic evaluation of healthcare interventions. Using selected examples of digital health interventions, it assesses how well existing guides and frameworks align to digital health interventions. It shows that digital health interventions may be best characterized as complex interventions in complex systems. Key features of complexity relate to intervention complexity, outcome complexity, and causal pathway complexity, with much of this driven by iterative intervention development over time and uncertainty regarding likely reach of the interventions among the relevant population. These characteristics imply that more-complex methods of economic evaluation are likely to be better able to capture fully the impact of the intervention on costs and benefits over the appropriate time horizon. This complexity includes wider measurement of costs and benefits, and a modeling framework that is able to capture dynamic interactions among the intervention, the population of interest, and the environment. The authors recommend that future research should develop and apply more-flexible modeling techniques to allow better prediction of the interdependency between interventions and important environmental influences.

A Systematic Review of Economic Evaluation Methodologies Between Resource-Limited and Resource-Rich Countries: A Case of Rotavirus Vaccines.

For more than three decades, the number and influence of economic evaluations of healthcare interventions have been increasing and gaining attention from a policy level. However, concerns about the credibility of these studies exist, particularly in studies from low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). This analysis was performed to explore economic evaluations conducted in LMICs in terms of methodological variations, quality of reporting and evidence used for the analyses. These results were compared with those studies conducted in high-income countries (HICs). Rotavirus vaccine was selected as a case study, as it is one of the interventions that many studies in both settings have explored. The search to identify individual studies on rotavirus vaccines was performed in March 2014 using MEDLINE and the National Health Service Economic Evaluation Database. Only full economic evaluations, comparing cost and outcomes of at least two alternatives, were included for review. Selected criteria were applied to assess methodological variation, quality of reporting and quality of evidence used. Eighty-five studies were included, consisting of 45 studies in HICs and 40 studies in LMICs. Seventy-five percent of the studies in LMICs were published by researchers from HICs. Compared with studies in HICs, the LMIC studies showed less methodological variety. In terms of the quality of reporting, LMICs had a high adherence to technical criteria, but HICs ultimately proved to be better. The same trend applied for the quality of evidence used. Although the quality of economic evaluations in LMICs was not as high as those from HICs, it is of an acceptable level given several limitations that exist in these settings. However, the results of this study may not reflect the fact that LMICs have developed a better research capacity in the domain of health economics, given that most of the studies were in theory led by researchers from HICs. Putting more effort into fostering the development of both research infrastructure and capacity building as well as encouraging local engagement in LMICs is thus necessary.

Neonatal transitional care unit: a new concept in India

In this era of increasing healthcare cost, the role of economic evaluation of healthcare interventions has become increasingly important in India. Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) stays are amongst the most expensive kind of hospitalizations. The Neonatal Transitional Care Unit (NTCU), in an area where the moderately affected new-born babies are managed near the mother. This is widely prevalent in western countries; however, is still a new concept in countries like India. In current scenario in India, any baby born with issues is transferred to NICU. There are certain medical conditions in newborn babies which can be managed in NTCU instead of transferring the babies to NICU. In NTCU these babies are managed under close supervision by qualified nursing staff and pediatricians where the parents act as main carers. This helps in early mother-infant bonding and also cost reduction. This has shown to have improved neonatal outcome, lesser duration of hospital stay, improved maternal and infant bonding and overall cost reductions.

Economic evaluation of healthcare interventions: old and new directions: Table 1:

The techniques of economic evaluation have been increasingly widely applied in the health sector over recent decades, with hundreds of published evaluations performed in many countries and ranging across prevention programmes, diagnostics, treatment interventions, and the organization of health care. This paper examines the main methods in current use, and describes the gradual systematization of economic evaluation methodologies and the increasing importance of reimbursement agencies with explicit technical requirements. It reviews controversies in areas such as discounting, analytic perspective, identifying a cost-effectiveness threshold, differential treatment of particular disease areas or treatment groups, and the valuation of outcomes. It then considers in more detail the development of the World Health Organization’s generalized cost-effectiveness framework, and the emergence of an international ‘reference case’ commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a way of increasing the generalizability and comparability of such studies. Finally the paper discusses some current controversies and possible future developments in this field.

A Systematic Review of the State of Economic Evaluation for Health Care in India.

Economic evaluations are one of the important tools in policy making for rational allocation of resources. Given the very low public investment in the health sector in India, it is critical that resources are used wisely on interventions proven to yield best results. Hence, we undertook this study to assess the extent and quality of evidence for economic evaluation of health-care interventions and programmes in India. A comprehensive search was conducted to search for published full economic evaluations pertaining to India and addressing a health-related intervention or programme. PubMed, Scopus, Embase, ScienceDirect, and York CRD database and websites of important research agencies were identified to search for economic evaluations published from January 1980 to the middle of November 2014. Two researchers independently assessed the quality of the studies based on Drummond and modelling checklist. Out of a total of 5013 articles enlisted after literature search, a total of 104 met the inclusion criteria for this systematic review. The majority of these papers were cost-effectiveness studies (64%), led by a clinician or public-health professional (77%), using decision analysis-based methods (59%), published in an international journal (80%) and addressing communicable diseases (58%). In addition, 42% were funded by an international funding agency or UN/bilateral aid agency, and 30% focussed on pharmaceuticals. The average quality score of these full economic evaluations was 65.1%. The major limitation was the inability to address uncertainties involved in modelling as only about one-third of the studies assessed modelling structural uncertainties (33%), or ran sub-group analyses to account for heterogeneity (36.5%) or analysed methodological uncertainty (32%). The existing literature on economic evaluations in India is inadequate to feed into sound policy making. There is an urgent need to generate awareness within the government of how economic evaluation can inform and benefit policy making, and at the same time build capacity of health-care professionals in understanding the economic principles of health-care delivery system.

REVIEWING TRANSFERABILITY IN ECONOMIC EVALUATIONS ORIGINATING FROM EASTERN EUROPE.

The aim of this study is to analyze the quality and transferability issues reported in published peer-reviewed English-language economic evaluations based in healthcare settings of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) and former Soviet countries. A systematic search of economic evaluations of healthcare interventions was performed for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Republic of Moldova, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. The included studies were assessed according to their characteristics, quality (using Drummond's checklist), use of local data, and the transferability of inputs and results, if addressed. Most of the thirty-four economic evaluations identified were conducted from a healthcare or payer perspective (74 percent), with 47 percent of studies focusing on infectious diseases. The least frequently and transparently addressed parameters were the items' stated perspectives, relevant costs included, accurately measured costs in appropriate units, outcomes and costs credibly valued, and uncertainties addressed. Local data were often used to assess unit costs, baseline risk, and resource usage, while jurisdiction-specific utilities were included in only one study. Only 32 percent of relevant studies discussed the limitations of using foreign data, and 36 percent of studies discussed the transferability of their own study results to other jurisdictions. Transferability of the results is not sufficiently discussed in published economic evaluations. To simplify the transferability of studies to other jurisdictions, the following should be comprehensively addressed: uncertainty, impact of influential parameters, and data transferability. The transparency of reporting should be improved.

Belgian guidelines for economic evaluations: second edition.

The aim of this study was to present the updated methodological guidelines for economic evaluations of healthcare interventions (drugs, medical devices, and other interventions) in Belgium. The update of the guidelines was performed by three Belgian health economists following feedback from users of the former guidelines and personal experience. The updated guidelines were discussed with a multidisciplinary team consisting of other health economists, assessors of reimbursement request files, representatives of Belgian databases and representatives of the drugs and medical devices industry. The final document was validated by three external validators that were not involved in the previous discussions. The guidelines give methodological guidance for the following components of an economic evaluation: literature review, perspective of the evaluation, definition of the target population, choice of the comparator, analytic technique and study design, calculation of costs, valuation of outcomes, definition of the time horizon, modeling, handling uncertainty and discounting. We present a reference case that can be considered as the minimal requirement for Belgian economic evaluations of health interventions. These guidelines will improve the methodological quality, transparency and uniformity of the economic evaluations performed in Belgium. The guidelines will also provide support to the researchers and assessors performing or evaluating economic evaluations.

Economic evaluation of interventions in health care.

Economic evaluation is rapidly becoming an invaluable tool for healthcare decision making, especially in light of current pressures on health services to reduce costs and increase expenditure on health care. This article provides an overview of the main methods used for the economic evaluation of healthcare interventions, and their applications and limitations. It is intended as an introduction to the topic for readers with no background in economics, and can be used to review the basic concepts of economic evaluation in healthcare provision.

Does Including Informal Care in Economic Evaluations Matter? A Systematic Review of Inclusion and Impact of Informal Care in Cost-Effectiveness Studies

Informal care makes an important contribution to societal welfare. However, it may involve substantial time costs and can have a considerable negative effect on the health and well-being of informal caregivers. These costs and effects of informal caregiving are often excluded in economic evaluations of healthcare interventions. The impact of this exclusion on the outcomes of these evaluations is largely unknown. This study aimed to explore the inclusion of informal care in economic evaluations and the potential impact of the costs and effects of informal caregiving on cost-effectiveness outcomes. A systematic review was conducted to identify economic evaluations of interventions in four distinct disease areas where informal care is potentially important: Alzheimer's disease, metastatic colorectal cancer, Parkinson's disease and rheumatoid arthritis. It was recorded how often economic evaluations included informal caregiving. Next, for the studies including informal care, the impact on cost-effectiveness outcomes was determined by removing informal care costs and effects of the cost-effectiveness calculations and recalculating the outcomes. The new cost-effectiveness outcomes were then compared with the original reported outcomes. The study identified 100 economic evaluations investigating interventions targeted at Alzheimer's disease (n = 25), metastatic colorectal cancer (n = 24), Parkinson's disease (n = 8) and rheumatoid arthritis (n = 43). Twenty-three of these evaluations (23 %) included costs and/or effects of informal caregiving: 64 % of the Alzheimer's disease studies, 0 % of the metastatic colorectal cancer studies, 13 % of Parkinson's disease studies and 14 % of rheumatoid arthritis studies. When informal care was included, this mostly concerned time costs. Studies rarely included both costs and effects. The effect of including or excluding informal care costs or effects on cost-effectiveness outcomes in most studies was modest, but in some studies the impact was strong. Most economic evaluations in the area of Alzheimer's disease include costs and/or effects related to informal caregiving. However, in other disease areas where informal caregiving is common it seems that the majority of economic evaluations ignore informal caregiving. The inclusion of informal care can have a strong impact on cost-effectiveness outcomes. Future economic evaluations should therefore consider the relevance of informal care in the context of their study, and either include these costs and effects or justify why they were excluded.

Economics and resourcing of complex healthcare systems

With rapid increases in healthcare spending over recent years, health economic evaluation might be thought to be increasing in importance to decision-makers. Such evaluations are designed to inform the efficient management of healthcare resources. However, research into health policy decisions often report, at best, moderate use of economic evaluation information, especially at the local level of administration. Little attention seems to have been given to the question of why economic evaluations have been underused and why they may yield different results in different contexts. There are many barriers to applying economic evaluations in situations which combine complexity with uncertainty. These barriers call for innovative and creative responses to economic evaluation of healthcare interventions. One response is to view economic evaluations in the context of complex adaptive systems theory. Such theory offers a conceptual framework that takes into account contextual factors, multiple input and output, multiple perspectives and uncertainty involved in healthcare interventions. This article illustrates how complexity theory can enrich and broaden policy-makers' understanding of why economic evaluations have not always been as successful as health economists would have hoped. It argues for health economists to emphasise contextual knowledge and relativist understanding of decision contexts rather than seeking more technically sound evidence-based reviews including economic evaluations.

The ‘how’ of cost-effectiveness analysis for care pathways is not straightforward

Introduction: As health-care payers are faced with the need to allocate finite resources to maximize the health and wellbeing of the population, interest in the economic evaluation of health-care interventions has risen over the past decades. Although we have become aware of the growing importance of economic issues in medicine, economic evaluations in care pathways have remained up to now rather limited.Even if we agree with the author that there is an urgent need for economic evaluations in health service interventions, we fear that this paper contains methodological flaws which may mislead the reader of the journal, as well as potential users of economic evaluations.

Responsiveness and minimal important score differences in quality‐of‐life questionnaires: a comparison of the EORTC QLQ‐C30 cancer‐specific questionnaire to the generic utility questionnaires EQ‐5D and 15D in patients with multiple myeloma

The aims of this study were to (i) compare the responsiveness of the EORTC QLQ-C30 cancer-specific questionnaire and the generic questionnaires EQ-5D and 15D used for economic evaluation of healthcare interventions and (ii) determine the minimal important differences (MIDs) in these questionnaires. The MID is the smallest change in a quality-of-life score considered important to patients. Between 2006 and 2008, 239 patients with multiple myeloma completed the questionnaires at inclusion (T1) and after 3 months (T2). At T2, patients were asked whether they had noticed any change in their quality of life. Responsiveness and MIDs were determined by mean score changes (T2-T1) for patients who, in the interview, stated they had improved, deteriorated, or were unchanged. Responsiveness was also assessed using standardized response means. Wilcoxon tests for pair differences were used to evaluate the statistical significance of the changes. Patients who improved had significantly (P < 0.01) higher scores at T2 in all three questionnaires. Patients who deteriorated reported lower scores at T2; however, for the 15D, the differences in score were not statistically significant. The MIDs for the QLQ-C30, EQ-5D, and 15D were 8, 0.08, and 0.03 in patients who improved and 12, 0.10 and 0.02 in patients who deteriorated, respectively. All three questionnaires showed an acceptable responsiveness in patients who improved. However, the 15D did not respond optimally in patients who deteriorate and cannot be recommended for use in patients with myeloma.

Register-based studies of healthcare costs

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview and a few examples of how national registers are used in analyses of healthcare costs in Denmark. The paper focuses on health economic analyses based on register data. For the sake of simplicity, the studies are divided into three main categories: economic evaluations of healthcare interventions, cost-of-illness analyses, and other analyses such as assessments of healthcare productivity. We examined a number of studies using register-based data on healthcare costs. Use of register-based data renders a comprehensive data material, often in the form of time series, which is very useful in health economic analyses. The disadvantage of register-based data is the use of tariffs, charges, or market prices as proxies for costs in the computation of healthcare costs.

Burden of disease and economic evaluation of healthcare interventions: are we investigating what really matters?

BackgroundThe allocation of limited available healthcare resources demands an agreed rational allocation principle and the consequent priority setting. We assessed the association between economic evaluations of healthcare interventions published in Spain (1983-2008) and the disease burden in the population.MethodsElectronic databases (e.g., PubMed/MEDLINE, SCOPUS, ISI Web of Knowledge, CRD, IME, IBECS) and reports from health technology assessment agencies were systematically reviewed. For each article, multiple variables were recorded such as: year and journal of publication, type of study, health intervention targetted, perspective of analysis, type of costs and sources of information, first author's affiliation, explicit recommendations aimed at decision-making, and the main disease cause to which the intervention was addressed. The following disease burden measures were calculated: years of life lost (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs), disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), and mortality by cause. Correlation and linear regression models were fitted.ResultsFour hundred and seventy-seven economic evaluations were identified. Cardiovascular diseases (15.7%), infectious diseases (15.3%), malignant neoplasms (13.2%), and neuropsychiatric diseases (9.6%) were the conditions most commonly addressed. Accidents and injuries, congenital anomalies, oral conditions, nutritional deficiencies and other neoplasms were the categories with a lowest number of studies (0.6% for each of them). For the main disease categories (n = 20), a correlation was seen with: mortality 0.67 (p = 0.001), DALYs 0.63 (p = 0.003), YLLs 0.54 (p = 0.014), and YLDs 0.51 (p = 0.018). By disease sub-categories (n = 51), the correlations were generally low and non statistically significant.ConclusionsExamining discrepancies between economic evaluations in particular diseases and the overall burden of disease helps shed light on whether there are potentially over- and under-investigated areas. The approach taken could help policy-makers understand whether resources for economic evaluation are being allocated by using summary measures of population health.

Evaluación económica de tecnologías sanitarias: una introducción para médicos

Economic evaluation of healthcare interventions is becoming increasingly important and are seen by decision makers as a useful tool on how best to allocate scarce resources efficiently by maximising the health of the population. It is therefore important that health care professionals understand the fundamentals of an economic analysis so that they can understand, evaluate and critically appraise published economic evaluations. This article presents an introduction to the economic analysis of health care interventions and describes the basic concepts of an economic evaluation. The authors introduce the concept of efficiency to defend the use of economic tools to guide or help decisions in healthcare. The article presents the cost-effectiveness plane as a useful instrument when presenting the results of an economic evaluation, and summarises the main ways on how costs and outcomes are measured. To help readers understand the concepts presented in this introduction, we draw on published examples of economic analyses undertaken in the field of stroke.

Evaluación económica de intervenciones sanitarias en España durante el periodo 1983-2008

Economic evaluation has been promoted as a tool to guide decision-making processes regarding healthcare resources' allocation and in the adoption of healthcare technologies. We analyzed the evolution and the main characteristics of economic evaluations of healthcare interventions done during the period 1983-2008 in Spain. Observational descriptive study. We performed a systematic review in the main bibliographic databases (PubMed/ MEDLINE, SCOPUS, ISI Web of Knowledge, CRD, IME, IBECS) and manually through Internet in journals and public reports. There were predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, and a set of variables to analyze the characteristics of the selected reports. In total, 477 studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Some of the studies characteristics were: cost-effectiveness analysis (62.5%), decision analysis techniques (34.0%), healthcare system perspective (42.1%), therapeutic interventions (70.0%) and non explicit financing (44.0%). The geographical distribution for Spanish regions of the first authors was: Catalonia (29.3%), Community of Madrid (23.7%), Andalusia (6,7%) and Region of Valencia (6.3%). A total of 50.9% of the principal authors were employed at hospital centers. The most common disease conditions were: cardiovascular diseases (15.7%), infectious and parasitic diseases (15.3%) and malignant neoplasms (13.2%). A total of 82.2 % of the reports provided recommendations for decision making. An increasing number of studies was observed. Identified reports combined heterogeneity in the quality of the information brought with regard to analysis methods, data sources, type of interventions, or disease conditions. It is suggested to do more efforts for improving the quantity and quality of reports in public health interventions.

The Use of QALYs in Clinical and Patient Decision-Making: Issues and Prospects

The Use of QALYs in Clinical and Patient Decision-Making: Issues and Prospects

I costi sanitari indiretti (non correlati) durante gli anni di vita guadagnati

Which costs and benefits to consider in economic evaluations of healthcare interventions remains an area of much controversy. Unrelated medical costs in life-years gained is an important cost category that is normally ignored in economic evaluations, irrespective of the perspective chosen for the analysis. National guidelines for pharmacoeconomic research largely endorse this practice, either by explicitly requiring researchers to exclude these costs from the analysis or by leaving inclusion or exclusion up to the discretion of the analyst. However, the inclusion of unrelated medical costs in life-years gained appears to be gaining support in the literature. This article provides an overview of the discussions to date. The inclusion of unrelated medical costs in life-years gained seems warranted, in terms of both optimality and internal and external consistency. We use an example of a smoking-cessation intervention to highlight the consequences of different practices of accounting for costs and effects in economic evaluations. Only inclusion of all costs and effects of unrelated medical care in life-years gained can be considered both internally and externally consistent. Including or excluding unrelated future medical costs may have important distributional consequences, especially for interventions that substantially increase length of life. Regarding practical objections against inclusion of future costs, it is important to note that it is becoming increasingly possible to accurately estimate unrelated medical costs in life-years gained. We therefore conclude that the inclusion of unrelated medical costs should become the new standard.

Unrelated Medical Costs in Life-Years Gained

Which costs and benefits to consider in economic evaluations of healthcare interventions remains an area of much controversy. Unrelated medical costs in life-years gained is an important cost category that is normally ignored in economic evaluations, irrespective of the perspective chosen for the analysis. National guidelines for pharmacoeconomic research largely endorse this practice, either by explicitly requiring researchers to exclude these costs from the analysis or by leaving inclusion or exclusion up to the discretion of the analyst. However, the inclusion of unrelated medical costs in life-years gained appears to be gaining support in the literature.This article provides an overview of the discussions to date. The inclusion of unrelated medical costs in life-years gained seems warranted, in terms of both optimality and internal and external consistency. We use an example of a smoking-cessation intervention to highlight the consequences of different practices of accounting for costs and effects in economic evaluations. Only inclusion of all costs and effects of unrelated medical care in life-years gained can be considered both internally and externally consistent. Including or excluding unrelated future medical costs may have important distributional consequences, especially for interventions that substantially increase length of life. Regarding practical objections against inclusion of future costs, it is important to note that it is becoming increasingly possible to accurately estimate unrelated medical costs in life-years gained. We therefore conclude that the inclusion of unrelated medical costs should become the new standard.