IVI’s Research Framework to Understand the Full Range of Economic Impacts on Patients and Caregivers

The Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) and AcademyHealth have developed a consensus document titled “A Research Framework to Understand the Full Range of Economic Impacts on Patients and Caregivers”

Direct Medical Costs: Patient or caregiver costs paid to a healthcare provider or healthcare system.Non-Clinical Healthcare Costs: Costs that are a direct result of seeking treatment but are not paid into the healthcare system.Social Impacts: Economic impacts that may have less obvious measures but have downstream impacts like time spent negotiating with insurance companies, compounding financial impacts, or access to social services.Ability to Work: Traditional work measures like productivity, sick days, and days off from work.Education and Job Attainment: Impacts such as career choice or educational attainment.Caregiver and Family Impacts: These are the economic impacts that caregivers experience because of the primary patient’s illness or health condition

The framework also notes that there are a number of underlying equity factors that are central to a person’s health journey. A more detailed list of the relevant components in each factor are below. To be frank, while the list of members of the steering committee and and individuals interviewed is impressive, the end result is a list where most of these components have already been listed as part of the Second Panel of Cost Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. Further, there is a lack fo clarity of how these list of components would change how standard cost effectiveness is conducted in practice. Nevertheless, the stakeholders that created this document have real experience with the challenges of standard CEA and the document is worth a read (full report here).