Rapidly ageing societies, growing populations and new health technologies have led to a dramatic increase in healthcare costs within the European Union (EU) and the future trend remains an upward one. Between 1972 and 2010, public health expenditure has risen from 4.5% to 8% of GDP across the EU. Especially chronic conditions, multi-morbidities and mental health issues pose a major financial burden to European healthcare systems. On the other hand, at least a quarter of the total direct cost impact of healthcare interventions affects other economic sectors, such as social care, education, the criminal justice system, employment and productivity.
The European research project PECUNIA (ProgrammE in Costing, resource use measurement and outcome valuation for Use in multi-sectoral National and International health economic evaluAtions) tackles this challenge by aiming to achieve better comparability, greater cost efficiency and higher level of optimisation in European healthcare provision. The PECUNIA consortium brings together ten partners* from six countries (DE, NL, UK, AT, ES, HU) with differing health care systems and economic evaluation landscapes coordinated by the Medical University of Vienna. Partners have multi-disciplinary academic backgrounds in medicine, public health, health economics, economics, health technology assessment, psychology and sociology.
The project’s vision is to improve the comparability and feasibility of cost and outcome assessment of healthcare interventions within and across European countries based on five specific main objectives. Objectives 1-4 focus on the development of internationally standardized, harmonized and validated multi-sectoral, multi-national and multi-person methods, tools and information for
1) self-reported resource use measurement (RUM),
2) reference unit cost valuation,
3) cross-country health utility assessment, and
4) patient-reported outcome measurement (PROM) of quality of life and wellbeing.
Objective 5 concerns the establishment of a plan for the sustainable maintenance and expansion of the PECUNIA methods and tools.
The project has been funded with €3 million by the European Commission's current Research Framework Programme Horizon 2020 to achieve these objectives between 2018 and 2020.
*PECUNIA partners at a glance are: AT: Medical University of Vienna (MUW), ES: Servicio Canariuo de la Salud (SESCS), Asociación Científica Psicost (Psicost), DE: Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), European Research and Project Office GmbH (EURICE), HU: Corvinus University of Budapest (CUB), NL: Maastricht University (UM), Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR), UK: London School of Economics (LSE), University of Bristol (UnivBris).
