Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: Informal care is crucial for providing comprehensive care to adult and pediatric patients. Consistently providing informal care can lower carers' overall quality of life and negatively impact their productivity, consequently affecting the labor supply and economic growth. The majority of studies on the caregiver burden do not establish a link to patients' utility. This gap hinders a comprehensive understanding of how changes in patients' utility affect informal carers and thus the impact of novel health interventions on caregiver burden. Our methodology, previously developed to measure the monetary value of the social impact of medical interventions, is now complemented with a methodology to estimate the social impact from the caregivers' perspective.
METHODS: We established a generic relation between patients' QALYs, and the time spent on caregiving, by employing the correlation between EQ-5D and care time in days based on the work by Rowen et al. 2016. To account for the "QALY-trap" phenomenon, a correction factor was applied. The socioeconomic value of avoided care time was quantified as avoided opportunity costs in terms of direct effects on paid and unpaid labor, as well as having broader economic impacts.
RESULTS: The adapted relationship enabled the derivation of avoided care time from patients' incremental QALY. External validity of the approach was tested using publicly available data on patients' utility with different severity levels of multiple sclerosis and the corresponding informal care time required. We found our approach to be in good agreement and a conservative estimate compared to other models.
CONCLUSIONS: Informal care represents a significant underrepresented part of care provided to patients. Our approach enables the incorporation of the caregiver perspective into economic evaluations, by quantification of societal consequences. Our holistic approach provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how alleviating patients' and caregivers' burden can impact societal well-being and economic development.