Objectives

• To develop a costing methodology and methodological recommendations for computing homogeneous unit costs across EU countries, that in the long-term, can evolve into a common European costing methodology for economic evaluation.

• To generate a minimum common dataset of health care costs (i.e. health-care services and goods/products) for EU countries

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Methodology

• Cost concepts will be clearly defined in order to ensure inter-country comparability.

• A costing methodology will be developed based on a literature review, the adaptation and synthesis of existing methodologies and a posterior process of discussion and consensus

• A search of existing health cost databases and sources of data will be carried out.

• Appropriate data sources will be identified and costs will be collected and integrated in a common EU direct cost database for economic evaluation of health interventions. The selection of data will be made by validating and adjusting existing available data with the agreed costing methodology. 

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Outputs​

• Deliverable D3.1: Guidelines for cost definitions and harmonization of cost accounting methodologies for economic evaluation [PDF]
   

• Deliverable D3.2: Database (final version) with the initial core dataset of costs and the User Manual; Final version of the Guidelines; List of standard unit costs with country values [PDF]
   

• User Manual [PDF]
   

• List of standard unit costs [XLSX]
   

• Work Package Overall Results – Poster [PDF]
   

• European Healthcare and Social Cost Database (EU HCCD)

The EU HCCD provides a core dataset of costs across countries. It allows analysis of variations in costs within/across countries (taking into account differences between healthcare systems and other factors) and health economic evaluations (by transfer of economic evaluation analysis and models across countries). Additionally, it facilitates multi-country studies and the adaptation of economic evaluation studies from country to country by reducing the time/costs of finding healthcare costs.

Access the database HERE.

 

Publications

• Špacírová Z, Epstein D, García-Mochón L et al. (2020) A general framework for classifying costing methods for economic evaluation of health care. European Journal of Health Economics 21, 529–542 [https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-019-01157-9]
   

• Adjusting costs for inflation in economic evaluations of healthcare – Poster [PDF]
   

• García-Mochón L, Špacírová Z, Espín J (2021) Costing methodologies in European economic evaluation guidelines: commonalities and divergences. European Journal of Health Economics. doi: 10.1007/s10198-021-01414-w