Transferability indices for health economic evaluations: methods and applications

Area of Science:

• Health Economics
• Health Technology Assessment

Background:

• Economic evaluations of health technologies are crucial for resource allocation.
• Assessing the transferability of these evaluations to different settings is challenging.
• Existing methods lack a comprehensive index for measuring transferability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a two-phase index for measuring the transferability of health technology economic evaluation results.
• To assess the internal consistency and external applicability of economic evaluations.
• To provide a quantitative measure for the degree of transferability.

Main Methods:

• A two-phase index was developed: Phase 1 for general transferability (objective factors), Phase 2 for specific applicability to new settings.
• Critical and non-critical factors were considered in the first phase.
• Indices were combined using arithmetic and geometric means to create a global transferability index.
• The global index was applied to 27 Spanish studies on infectious diseases.

Main Results:

• The global transferability index averaged 0.54 across 27 studies, significantly below the maximum theoretical value of 1.
• Eleven studies (approximately 41%) were deemed not transferable due to lacking critical factors.
• The developed index provides a quantitative measure of transferability for health economic evaluations.

Conclusions:

• The transferability of health technology economic evaluations is often limited, with significant variability across studies.
• The developed global index offers a valuable tool for researchers and policymakers to assess the reliability of economic evaluation results in new contexts.
• Future research should focus on refining transferability criteria and applying the index to diverse health technology evaluations and settings.