Completing costs: patients' time.

Area of Science:

• Health Economics
• Medical Costing
• Patient-Centered Care

Background:

• Patient time is a crucial but often omitted component in health and medical care costing and cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs).
• Studies indicate that patient time costs can exceed direct medical costs in interventions for cancer care, smoking cessation, and diabetes self-management.
• This omission can impact patient willingness to engage in interventions and lead to biased economic evaluations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To highlight the significance of patients' time as a cost in healthcare.
• To provide practical methods for incorporating patient time into costing studies with minimal additional effort.
• To advocate for the routine inclusion of patient time in economic evaluations.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing counts of formal medical services as a basis for valuing patient time.
• Applying the principle of opportunity cost, often proxied by market wage rates, to value patients' time.
• Leveraging readily available wage data for consistent valuation.

Main Results:

• Patient time represents a substantial cost in healthcare interventions, frequently underestimated in traditional analyses.
• The proposed methods offer a feasible approach to measure and value patient time without significantly increasing study workload.
• Routine inclusion of patient time data enhances the precision of economic evaluations.

Conclusions:

• Excluding patient time from analyses leads to an underestimation of disease burden and can skew cost-effectiveness findings.
• The necessary tools and data for incorporating patient time are accessible and will improve with consistent application.
• Integrating patient time valuation is essential for accurate and comprehensive health economic assessments.