Specific objectives of PECUNIA over its 42-month work plan are to develop:
Click to learn more about the individual objectives of each work package.
Standardised methods on the measurement and valuation of services in the health and social care sector that are applicable across countries are currently lacking. WP1 will focus on the development of such methods and tools allowing for low-threshold extension and update in the future. Depression, schizophrenia and PTSD will be used as illustrative disease areas.
Work package lead: Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf
Mental disorders are known for their wide impact on the capabilities and social behavior of those diagnosed, the significant others, as well as on the society as a whole. Intervention in mental health care generates costs and benefits that spill over to sectors outside the health care sector, such as the educational sector and the criminal justice system. Little work has been done looking at the identification, measurement, and valuation of these costs within economic evaluation.
Work package lead: Maastricht University
Productivity losses refer to costs associated with production loss and replacement costs due to illness, disability and death of productive persons, in both paid and unpaid work. To be able to identify health-related productivity changes it is important to understand where and when they can emerge. In general, the several ways are: (i) lower production levels and hence welfare decrease; (ii) higher cost of production levels (e.g., hiring additional labor); or (iii) some combination of both (e.g., when a replacement is not as productive as the worker replaced). In this WP, the relevant factors driving productivity costs are identified.
Work package lead: Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
Especially in mental health, patient, family and informal care costs can be a major cost component in economic evaluations conducted from a societal perspective. However, existing methods for measurement and valuation are diverse, resulting in cross-study differences driven by methodological inconsistencies.
Work package lead: Corvinus University of Budapest
WP5 will focus on the harmonised assessment of outcomes in multi-national, multi-sectoral and (where relevant) multi-person economic evaluations. It will carry out two parallel activities, one addressing cross-country variations in utility measurement, the other one harmonising methods for broader wellbeing measurement. No limitations to disease areas will be used.
Work package lead: Medizinische Universität Wien
Piloting and validation for feasibility, within- and cross-country transferability, and applicability within an HTA framework of the methods and tools developed in WP1-5 will be conducted in WP6. These activities will be undertaken in Spain, a country without an established national unit cost programme and with a decentralised health care system structure allowing for the assessment of within-country variations.
Work package lead: Servicio Canario de la Salud
WP7 will provide clear organisational and scientific frameworks and all necessary support mechanisms to enable a smooth project workflow in PECUNIA and to ensure that all contractual commitments will be met in time. Particular attention will be paid to enhancing the close organisational and scientific integration of all partners into the consortium and to integrating all deliverables into a cohesive scientific framework through unified concept development and ongoing support and guidance.
Work package lead: Medizinische Universität Wien
WP8 will ensure consistent dissemination and communication, ensuring optimal visibility, a wide outreach to and involvement of all relevant stakeholders, as well as strategic planning and operational support of project exploitation through dedicated innovation management. Innovation management is supported by proper project management (WP7) to ensure that high-quality results are created, captured, assessed and used.
Work package lead: European Research and Project Office GmbH
In order to establish a standardized framework for internationally comparable lists and descriptions of multi-sectoral services, HA1 will focus on identification of these core services and resources. Subsequently a master service list for the sectors Health & social care, Education & criminal justice, Employment and Patient, Family & informal care will be created.
Horizontal activity lead: Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf
Cross-cutting methodological tasks for WPs1-4 will be harmonized across four horizontal axes. HA2 consists on the development of a classification system for costing purposes to which the services can be mapped. For that purpose, a list of relevant variables related to unit cost measurement (what, where, how, to whom etc.) will be determined for every service identified in HA1 for all sectors (WP1-4).
Horizontal activity lead: Asociación Científica Psicost
Resource use measurement is known to be a challenging, time – consuming, but yet essential step in economic evaluations of health care interventions. Measuring the true quantities of resources utilized is of major importance for requiring valid costing estimates. HA3 aims to unify the measurement section within PECUNIA and to give guidance in the wide variety of available methods for resource-use measurement.
Horizontal activity lead: Maastricht University
HA4 Valuation addresses the final step in the costing process of a service/resource use. Valuation implies that the different resources used for the production of a unit of a service are multiplied with their cost and summed up to derive the cost of one service unit. From a health economics perspective, there is a general consensus that the derived costs should ideally capture the opportunity cost, also referred to as the true ‘economic cost’. Sector-specific issues relating to different valuation approaches will be addressed using publicly available data in a multi-staged process.
Horizontal activity lead: Medizinische Universität Wien