Evaluating the long-term cost-effectiveness of the COBRA-BPS programme in Pakistan

The Control of Blood Pressure and Risk Attenuation-Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (COBRA-BPS) programme is a community-based initiative for managing hypertension in rural South Asia. Previous analyses found the intervention more effective but too costly to be considered cost-effective, using a gross domestic product-based threshold cost-effectiveness threshold that overlooked Pakistan's constrained healthcare resources. Additionally, key benefits, such as avoided cardiovascular events and associated cost savings, were not considered. This study evaluates the long-term cost-effectiveness of the COBRA-BPS programme compared with the standard of care (SoC) in Pakistan.

A Markov model was used to estimate long-term costs and health outcomes, measured in life years and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Cost-effectiveness was assessed using incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) and net monetary benefit statistics. Thresholds of US$183 (based on Pakistan's marginal productivity of public health expenditure), US$500 and US$1000 per DALY averted were applied. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to assess robustness.

Based on the pooled results, the COBRA-BPS programme incurred higher costs than SoC, with an incremental cost of US$105 and an incremental gain of 0.41 DALYs averted over individuals' lifetimes, resulting in an ICER of US$252 per DALY averted.

COBRA-BPS effectively reduces cardiovascular events but has marginal cost-effectiveness when evaluated against the US$183 per DALY threshold. However, it becomes cost-effective at higher thresholds. Compared with previous analyses, our study found a significantly lower cost per DALY averted, driven by substantial downstream cost savings from avoided cardiovascular events.