Broad debates on whether and how to include caregiver perspectives in health technology assessment (HTA) continue. However, AD is atypical in the large potential effects treatments may have on caregivers.

From academic, patient organisation, payer, and industry perspectives, this session will explore the importance of including caregiver impacts when evaluating AD interventions and discuss the key challenges in including them in health technology assessments.

The session will be introduced with a summary of definitions of caregiver outcomes and current recommendations from HTA agencies surrounding their inclusion. Speakers will then discuss: (i) how the high prevalence of AD, the large unmet need, the substantial equity impacts of AD, and its large effects on caregivers’ health and work-related outcomes supports the importance of routine inclusion of caregiver outcomes in assessments of AD therapies; (ii) the key methodological challenges for including caregiver outcomes in HTA for AD, including data availability, risk of double-counting impacts on caregiver and patient health, the presence of multiple caregivers, and whether to differentially weight the QoL outcomes of caregivers and patients; and (iii) what changes in HTA frameworks are required to fully capture the impacts of AD treatments on caregivers, such as taking a wider perspective where important costs and benefits are not currently recommended for inclusion, improving methodological guidance where inclusion is already recommended, and the inclusion of impacts on caregivers qualitatively or separately, rather than pushing to integrate them quantitatively within traditional cost-effectiveness approaches.