Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: Cost of illness studies often focus on a single illness and cannot be compared to other studies or illnesses because of inconsistent methods. This produces a wide range of cost estimates rendering comparisons difficult across different regions, such as Asia Pacific and North America. The Economic Cost of Illness Program at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) aims to address these gaps by modernizing cost of illness estimates using standard and consistent methods to determine the economic impact of illnesses.
METHODS: The Program aims to estimate the costs of over 100 illnesses using consistent methods for all illnesses based on analytical years 2018 (nonCOVID-19) and 2020 (COVID-19 outset). A societal perspective is applied, which includes direct and indirect costs. Direct cost components are prescription drugs, physicians, hospitals and formal caregiving. Indirect cost components comprise the loss of productivity, informal caregiving, and premature mortality. Indirect costs apply the friction cost method, which considers the time to replace an absentee worker displaced from work due to an illness. Additionally, methods use a top down and prevalence based approach using electronic medical records and health surveys.
RESULTS: Cost estimates of over 100 illnesses across most cost components broken down by age, sex, and province will be disseminated in an online user interface. This interface allows users to create customized output tables to select various outputs such as the illness(es), cost component, and demography plus analytical year. Reports for each cost component outlining the methods and high-level results will be available.
CONCLUSIONS: The PHAC’s Economic Cost of Illness Program provides valuable economic evidence for policy development. Applying consistent methods can enable comparability of cost estimates in regional settings or across different regions. If these same methods are consistently applied across different regions including Asia Pacific, it can enable inter comparisons across disparate illnesses and regions.