Call for Patient Representatives for the COMPAR-EU project

EPF is planning to expand and diversify the group of patients and patient representatives involved in the COMPAR-EU patient panel.

Do you live with Type 2 Diabetes, Obesity, COPD or Heart Failure, or have experience in these diseases and are interested in joining an online group? We invite you to express your interest today!

The patient panel is an informal working group composed of EPF members, individual patients and also patient advocates from across Europe. The group is involved in project activities through various channels and meets (online) for monthly webinars. The patient panel supports in the production of materials in lay language and development of other project outputs. In 2021, it will focus on the functionality of the COMPAR-EU IT platform and materials on cost effectiveness.

All these activities will bring even more of a patient focus to COMPAR-EU, and showcase the direct benefits of patient involvement. The group is on voluntary basis, however, a compensation is foreseen.

Are you interested, or know someone that may be interested in joining the patient panel?
You can reach out to EPF Senior Programme Officer, Lyudmil Ninov: lyudmil.ninov@eu-patient.eu

Prolonging lives with self-management

What do you need to know about future costs and cost effectiveness analysis?

‘Future costs’ are costs that are incurred in life years gained if a preventive intervention or medical treatment postpones death. Imagine that because of a self-management intervention a person with diabetes is able to lower his/her weight and better control HbA1c, and thereby prevents a fatal heart attack and lives longer. Because of these survival benefits this person will consume medical care (and also other goods and services) in added life years. The costs of this consumption in added life years are called future costs.

The literature shows that future costs need to be included in cost-effectiveness analysis if the aim is to maximize population health given constrained resources [3].

In both of the published papers we lay out the methods that can be used, with aggregate population data, to estimate future costs for a particular intervention. These vary between the two countries due to different perspectives of healthcare decision makers and the data available.

Findings from these methods

Our findings show that future costs rise with age and with the amount of life-years gained from the intervention in question. Alongside our two papers we have published two separate online tools, both under the name ‘PAID’ which are freely available, that allow researchers doing cost-effectiveness analyses to download the future medical costs specific to their intervention. This removes several hurdles from the otherwise time-consuming process of including future unrelated medical costs and future non-medical costs in economic evaluation. This will lead to less biased estimates of cost-effectiveness and provide more reliable rankings of self-management interventions.

Photo_PieterVanBaal_COMPAR-EU

Pieter van Baal

Pieter van Baal is Associate Professor in Health Economics at Erasmus School for Health Policy and Management (ESPHM). His research focuses on methods for cost-effectiveness analysis, measuring and forecasting population health, the economics of prevention and ageing and the modelling of chronic diseases.

SharePoint Photo

Meg Perry-Duxbury

Meg Perry-Duxbury is finishing her PhD in Health Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and now works at TU Delft as an Open Science trainer. Her research has focused on how we can account for future health events in health care decision-making. Meg holds a master’s degree in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam.

References

  1. Kellerborg, K., Perry-Duxbury, M., de Vries, L., & van Baal, P. (2020). Practical Guidance for Including Future Costs in Economic Evaluations in The Netherlands: Introducing and Applying PAID 3.0. Value in Health, 23(11), 1453-1461.
  2. Perry-Duxbury, M., Asaria, M., Lomas, J., & van Baal, P. (2020). Cured Today, Ill Tomorrow: A Method for Including Future Unrelated Medical Costs in Economic Evaluation in England and Wales. Value in Health, 23(8), 1027-1033.
  3. de Vries L,M., van Baal P,H.M., Brouwer WBF. Future costs in cost-effectiveness analyses: Past, present, future. 2019;37:119-130.

Resources

Online Tools: https://www.imta.nl/paid

Self-management interventions for adults living with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD): The development of a Core Outcome Set for COMPAR-EU project

Call for Panel members

Do you want to be part of a panel that will formulate clinical recommendations about the most promising self-management interventions for patients with obesity?

Your participation will help ensuring that effective and safe self-management interventions are equally accessible for patients with obesity.

We are looking for healthcare professionals and patients/caregivers that will formulate recommendations about the use of self-management interventions for patients with obesity. For more information please click here.

If you are interested in participating in this panel, please register here by 19 March 2021.