Measuring and Incorporating Financial Protection into Economic Evaluation in Health Care

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Each year millions of people suffer financial hardship because of expensive illnesses. In developing countries, paying for care often makes families fall into poverty. This is an important issue also in developed countries. In the UK patients have had their requests for expensive medicines denied by the NHS, having to pay for the whole treatment themselves if they choose to buy them. The NHS justifies such decisions based on cost-effectiveness evidence from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). By cost-effective, NICE means that the health benefits for the patient should be larger enough than treatment costs for the NHS to justify taxpayer‘s funding.While most people would agree that protection against hardship from expensive treatments is a valuable benefit too, such value is not currently considered in cost-effectiveness analyses. The research led by Dr Rodrigo Moreno-Serra at Imperial College London investigates how methods of cost-effectiveness analysis could be modified to include benefits of protection against expensive illnesses. It will use data from different countries to measure risk protection benefits, and assess how cost-effectiveness figures for expensive treatments change when these benefits are included. This research may change the way high-cost treatments are regarded by governments and agencies like NICE.