Internet pharmaco-economic studies in metastatic colorectal cancer

An interactive Web site has been developed: http://smbh7.smbh.univ-paris13.fr, which uses a Markov model to calculate the management costs for metastatic colorectal cancer. This site allows drug usage costs, daily tariff costs per site, local ISA point values and the cost to the society of the chemotherapies prescribed to be recorded by cycle in a de-centralised manner. The overall cost of treatment may be calculated by one of these four units from the time when the first chemotherapy was administered until the patient has escaped from first or second line treatment. The median time to progression and the median survival time are key parameters used to calculate costs as they determine the number of patients who remain on treatment, course by course. Effectiveness results have been measured in terms of progression free survival or of global survival. Eight treatment strategies have been examined. It is possible to add new treatment regimens or new compounds into the existing pre-formatted tables. This software enables budgets to be planned depending on the regimen used and the number of patients treated. It also allows the different treatment options to be classified with respect to their incremental cost effectiveness ratio, which is defined by the additional cost of one treatment option compared to another divided by the corresponding increase in effectiveness.