Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
The estimation and inclusion of presenteeism costs in applied economic evaluation: a systematic review. Value in Health Published 30th January 2017
Presenteeism is one of those issues that you hear about from time to time, but rarely see addressed within economic evaluations. For those who haven’t come across it before, presenteeism refers to being at work, but not working at full capacity, for example, due to your health limiting your ability to work. The literature suggests that given presenteeism can have large associated costs which could significantly impact economic evaluations, it should be considered. These impacts are rarely captured in practice. This paper sought to identify studies where presenteeism costs were included, examined how valuation was approached and the degree of impact of including presenteeism on costs. The review included cost of illness studies as well as economic evaluations, just 28 papers had attempted to capture the costs of presenteeism, these were in a wide variety of disease areas. A range of methods was used, across all studies, presenteeism costs accounted for 52% (range from 19%-85%) of the total costs relating to the intervention and disease. This is a vast proportion and significantly outweighed absenteeism costs. Presenteeism is clearly a significant issue, yet widely ignored within economic evaluation. This in part may be due to the health and social care perspective advised within the NICE reference case and compounded by the lack of guidance in how to measure and value productivity costs. Should an economic evaluation pursue a societal perspective, the findings suggest that capturing and valuing presenteeism costs should be a priority.
Priority to end of life treatments? Views of the public in the Netherlands. Value in Health Published 5th January 2017
Everybody dies, and thus, end of life care is probably something that we should all have at least a passing interest in. The end of life context is an incredibly tricky research area with methodological pitfalls at every turn. End of life care is often seen as ‘different’ to other care, and this is reflected in NICE having supplementary guidance for the appraisal of end of life interventions. Similarly, in the Netherlands, treatments that do not meet typical cost per QALY thresholds may be provided should public support be sufficient. There, however, is a dearth of such evidence, and this paper sought to elucidate this issue using the novel Q methodology. Three primary viewpoints emerged: 1) Access to healthcare as a human right – all have equal rights regardless of setting, that is, nobody is more important. Viewpoint one appeared to reject the notion of scarce resources when it comes to health: ‘you can’t put a price on life’. 2) The second group focussed on providing the ‘right’ care for those with terminal illness and emphasised that quality of life should be respected and unnecessary care at end of life should be avoided. This second group did not place great importance on cost-effectiveness but did acknowledge that costly treatments at end of life might not be the best use of money. 3) Finally, the third group felt there should be a focus on care which is effective and efficient, that is, those treatments which generate the most health should be prioritised. There was a consensus across all three groups that the ultimate goal of the health system is to generate the greatest overall health benefit for the population. This rejects the notion that priority should be given to those at end of life and the study concludes that across the three groups there was minimal support for the possibility of the terminally ill being treated with priority.
Methodological issues surrounding the use of baseline health-related quality of life data to inform trial-based economic evaluations of interventions within emergency and critical care settings: a systematic literature review. PharmacoEconomics [PubMed] Published 6th January 2017
Catchy title. Conducting research within emergency and critical settings presents a number of unique challenges. For the health economist seeking to conduct a trial based economic evaluation, one such issue relates to the calculation of QALYs. To calculate QALYs within a trial, baseline and follow-up data are required. For obvious reasons – severe and acute injuries/illness, unplanned admission – collecting baseline data on those entering emergency and critical care is problematic. Even when patients are conscious, there are ethical issues surrounding collecting baseline data in this setting, the example used relates to somebody being conscious after cardiac arrest, is it appropriate to be getting them to complete HRQL questionnaires? Probably not. Various methods have been used to circumnavigate this issue; this paper sought to systematically review the methods that have been used and provide guidance for future studies. Just 19 studies made it through screening, thus highlighting the difficulty of research in this context. Just one study prospectively collected baseline HRQL data, and this was restricted to patients in a non-life threatening state. Four different strategies were adopted in the remaining papers. Eight studies adopted a fixed health utility for all participants at baseline, four used only the available data, that is, from the first time point where HRQL was measured. One asked patients to retrospectively recall their baseline state, whilst one other used Delphi methods to derive EQ-5D states from experts. The paper examines the implications and limitations of adopting each of these strategies. The key finding seems to relate to whether or not the trial arms are balanced with respect to HRQL at baseline. This obviously isn’t observed, the authors suggest trial covariates should instead be used to explore this, and adjustments made where applicable. If, and that’s a big if, trial arms are balanced, then all of the four methods suggested should give similar answers. It seems the key here is the randomisation, however, even the best randomisation techniques do not always lead to balanced arms and there is no guarantee of baseline balance. The authors conclude trials should aim to make an initial assessment of HRQL at the earliest opportunity and that further research is required to thoroughly examine how the different approaches will impact cost-effectiveness results.
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