Practical Guidance for Including Future Costs in Economic Evaluations in The Netherlands: Introducing and Applying...

A consensus has been reached in The Netherlands that all future medical costs should be included in economic evaluations. Furthermore, internationally, there is the recognition that in countries that adopt a societal perspective estimates of future nonmedical consumption are relevant for decision makers as much as production gains are. The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) to update the tool Practical Application to Include Future Disease Costs (PAID 1.1), based on 2013 data, for the estimation of future unrelated medical costs and introduce future nonmedical consumption costs, further standardizing and facilitating the inclusion of future costs; and (2) to demonstrate how to use the tool in practice, showing the impact of including future unrelated medical costs and future nonmedical consumption in a case-study where a life is hypothetically saved at different ages and 2 additional cases where published studies are updated by including future costs.

Using the latest published cost of illness data from the year 2017, we model future unrelated medical costs as a function of age, sex, and time to death, which varies per disease. The Household Survey from Centraal Bureau Statistiek is used to estimate future nonmedical consumption by age.

The updated incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) from the case studies show that including future costs can have a substantial effect on the ICER, possibly affecting choices made by decision makers.

This article improves upon previous work and provides the first tool for the inclusion of future nonmedical consumption in The Netherlands.