Austrian Unit Cost Programme

DHE Unit Cost Programme for Austria

A key feature of any economic evaluation is the cost analysis of included alternatives. For this it is necessary to measure and value resource use in a systematic way. The latter step is based on unit cost information, i.e. cost data of providing one unit of a good or service. From an analytical perspective, the relevant costing processes have received relatively little attention to date. This is often considered a critical weakness, hindering not only the interpretation and comparison of studies but also resulting in methodological criticism of economic evaluations and cost studies in general. To overcome these issues internationally standardized collections of unit costs have been established in several countries in recent years. In this context, this project intends to set-up an independent, two-staged unit cost programme for Austria involving all relevant stakeholders:

●  Stage 1: To report the status quo by collating relevant available unit costs used in existing published health economic evaluations from the Austrian health care sector and publish the information in a publicly available (online) database supported by a relevant report.

●  Stage 2: To establish a publicly available, annually updated standardized unit cost library based on existing datasets and nouveau micro costing of local data.

Such a standardized unit cost library would provide a systematic basis for health care decision making in general, foster methodological transparency, and allow for a better comparison between economic evaluations and cost studies nationally and internationally.

The Kick-off meeting of the programme took place at the DHE on August 13, 2014.

Dates:
Ongoing since 2014

Information:
Judit Simon, Susanne Mayer