Main objective
To perform an economic evaluation of the three interventions tested in PRECIOUS for individual countries and on a European level.
This can be split into 3 component objectives:
- Collection of data on health and use of healthcare resources
- Creation of models for calculation of health benefits and costs
- Analysis of incremental cost/health benefit in the longer run
Description of the tasks
This work package will perform an economic evaluation of the treatments that are evaluated in PRECIOUS. The evaluation will use a long-term and societal perspective, and include both the direct and indirect, monetary and non-monetary costs and health benefits. Cost will be valued in monetary units and health benefit in quality adjusted life years (QALYs).
We will use a Markov model to estimate the monetary costs and the QALYs. In this model each patient is assumed to be in a certain state, and for each time period there is a certain probability that the patient will go from one state to another (“transition probability”). We will simulate the flow of patients between the different states and use this to estimate the average QALYs patients will gain. The incremental costs will be divided by the incremental QALYs, and the incremental cost/benefit ratio is a key variable in the decision to recommend a treatment.
