Workshop - Conducting Economic Evaluations in Child Health

Audience: Of interest to HTA producers and users, especially those working in child health who produce or consider pediatric health economic evidence.

Level: Intermediate

What you’ll learn: Participants will gain a deeper understanding of the application of economic evaluation methods to child health.

• Dr. Wendy Ungar, SickKids Research Institute
• Dr. Myla Moretti, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)
• Kate Tsiplova, SickKids Research Institute

Abstract:
Background:
With the growth in using economic evaluation to inform budget decisions, challenges in applying standard methods to special populations are increasingly apparent. This is especially true for pediatric economic evaluation. Compared to adults, children display unique patterns of morbidity and mortality, unique patterns of health resource use, and depend on a parent or caregiver to act as gatekeeper and reporter. Moreover, valid methods to measure health state utilities in newborns, infants, and toddlers do not exist. These issues create challenges for the conducting of economic evaluation in children.

Description:
Specific challenges include capturing the full spectrum of social and physiological impacts, defining outcome measures for the very young, taking developmental change into account, separating parent and child preferences, extending costing beyond the health care system to include school and community resources, determining productivity costs for children and their parents and caregivers, using life-long time horizons, costing stages of development, developing valid and reliable instruments for assessing utility and quality of life in children, using parent proxy measures for costs and outcomes, and choosing the appropriate unit of analysis.
Objectives:

1. to provide a basic understanding of conducting health economic evaluations in children
2. to identify and discuss key methodological challenges in the areas of:
   • defining and selecting health outcomes
   • costing
   • measurement
   • modelling and analysis
   • to share examples of pediatric economic evaluations used in decision-making

to gain hands-on experience by working in small groups to solve a pediatric costing exercise.

Register: