CEA studies may be prospective studies or modelled studies

Asked: 27 Feb 2017 | 1590

CEA studies may be prospective studies or modelled studies. Would economic evaluations be called “modelled studies” (clinical outcome is taken from systematic review and meta-analysis) rather than collecting primary data to measure clinical outcomes? If data for clinical outcome is collected, should “surrogate outcome” be used? Alternatively, in case the study is only for short time horizon, how would the model change (for example, discounting and decision tree might not be included)?

Modelling

Expert Replies:

Yot Teerawattananon

Senior Researcher | Thailand | Replied: 27 Feb 2017 at 11:17

There are two types of economic evaluation. One is model based, another is alongside clinical studies. The model-based economic evaluation can use data from either literature review or clinical studies because the model-based economic evaluation allows surrogate outcomes to be modeled in order to predict the final outcome, i.e. morbidity, mortality, or QALY. On the other hand, economic evaluation alongside clinical trial can only use data from primary study, which means that the time horizon for these studies is generally short and perhaps the outcome can only be measured in terms of clinical surrogates and not clinical end-point. To sum-up, the point of using surrogate outcome is not only attached to model-based economic evaluation, and model-based economic evaluation can sometimes use local clinical studies as well.