OBJECTIVES: A product’s safety profile affects the healthcare system across a range of dimensions. Adverse events (AEs) not only result in additional costs, but also reduce patients’ quality of life, affect adherence to treatments and cause additional resourcing burden on hospitals. While cost and health implications of AEs are often included in economic evaluations, the resourcing implications are rarely considered. The proposed framework models the expected resourcing impact of AEs for a hospital setting.

METHODS: A modelling framework was designed to estimate the hospital resources required to treat pancreatic cancer patients with either gemcitabine or 5‑FU. For each AE included in the safety profiles of both products, time-to-event and event duration was collected to generate the expected AE schedule. The likelihood of each event occurring and resulting in hospitalization were collected to estimate the number of patients requiring hospital resources for each event type.

RESULTS: The model estimates that the overall rate of AEs experienced with 5-FU will be 64% lower compared to with gemcitabine. Furthermore, the AE schedule shows that, for both products, approximately 20% of events occur within the first hours following administration. For a cohort of 100 patients, over 45 more AE-related hospitalizations are expected to occur when using gemcitabine, versus using 5-FU.

CONCLUSIONS: Many hospitals face resource constraints, such as limited beds or staff. These may impact on hospitals’ ability to deliver the healthcare planned by payers and expected by patients. Therefore, it is important to be able to estimate the burden on hospital resources associated with a treatment’s toxicity. As mitigating resource constraints would require structural reforms, this research provides a helpful tool to manage AEs with the resources available.