A framework for including health spillovers in economic evaluation

H Al-Janabi, Job van Exel, Werner Brouwer, C Trotter, L Glennie, L Hannigan, J Coast

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

84 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Health care interventions may affect the health of patients’ family networks. It has been suggested that these “health spillovers” should be included in economic evaluation, but there is not a systematic method for doing this. In this article, we develop a framework for including health spillovers in economic evaluation. We focus on extra-welfarist economic evaluations where the objective is to maximize health benefits from a health care budget (the “health care perspective”). Our framework involves adapting the conventional cost-effectiveness decision rule to include 2 multiplier effects to internalize the spillover effects. These multiplier effects express the ratio of total health effects (for patients and their family networks) to patient health effects. One multiplier effect is specified for health benefit generated from providing a new intervention, one for health benefit displaced by funding this intervention. We show that using multiplier effects to internalize health spillovers could change the optimal funding decisions and generate additional health benefits to society.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)176-186
Number of pages11
JournalMedical Decision Making
Volume36
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Sept 2015

Research programs

  • EMC NIHES-05-63-02 Quality

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