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. 2023 Sep 29;23(1):1045.
doi: 10.1186/s12913-023-09944-0.

The identification of economically relevant health and social care services for mental disorders in the PECUNIA project

Paul Hinck  1 , Mencia Gutierrez-Colosía  2   3 , Christine Duval  1 , Hans-Helmut König  1 , Judit Simon  4   5 , Claudia Fischer  4 , Susanne Mayer  4 , Luis Salvador-Carulla  6   7 , Valentin Brodszky  8 , Leona Hakkaart-van Roijen  9   10 , Silvia Evers  11   12 , A-La Park  13 , William Hollingworth  14 ; PECUNIA Group; Alexander Konnopka  15
Collaborators, Affiliations

The identification of economically relevant health and social care services for mental disorders in the PECUNIA project

Paul Hinck et al. BMC Health Serv Res. .

Abstract

Background: Health economic research is still facing significant problems regarding the standardization and international comparability of health care services. As a result, comparative effectiveness studies and cost-effectiveness analyses are often not comparable. This study is part of the PECUNIA project, which aimed to improve the comparability of economic evaluations by developing instruments for the internationally standardized measurement and valuation of health care services for mental disorders. The aim of this study was to identify internationally relevant services in the health and social care sectors relevant for health economic studies for mental disorders.

Methods: A systematic literature review on cost-of-illness studies and economic evaluations was conducted to identify relevant services, complemented by an additional grey literature search and a search of resource use measurement (RUM) questionnaires. A preliminary long-list of identified services was explored and reduced to a short-list by multiple consolidation rounds within the international research team and an external international expert survey in six European countries.

Results: After duplicate removal, the systematic search yielded 15,218 hits. From these 295 potential services could be identified. The grey literature search led to 368 and the RUM search to 36 additional potential services. The consolidation process resulted in a preliminary list of 186 health and social care services which underwent an external expert survey. A final consolidation step led to a basic list of 56 services grouped into residential care, daycare, outpatient care, information for care, accessibility to care, and self-help and voluntary care.

Conclusions: The initial literature searches led to an extensive number of potential service items for health and social care. Many of these items turned out to be procedures, interventions or providing professionals rather than services and were removed from further analysis. The resulting list was used as a basis for typological coding, the development of RUM questionnaires and corresponding unit costs for international mental health economic studies in the PECUNIA project.

Keywords: Economic evaluation; Mental disorders; Resource use measurement; Service identification.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Process of the identification of relevant health and social care services in the PECUNIA project
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
PRISMA flow chart of the systematic literature search
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The process of identification and disambiguation of items
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