This overview introduces a new effort by the Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) and AcademyHealth to develop a framework for capturing the full range of economic impacts that people living with serious health conditions—and their caregivers—experience. It explains that traditional research focuses narrowly on medical costs defined by payers (like copays and deductibles), while patients and caregivers face a much broader set of economic burdens, including transportation costs, lost work ability, and behavioral health effects. The document lays out the goals of the project, which include defining what “economic impacts” mean for patients and caregivers, identifying priority cost areas to measure, acknowledging data gaps and barriers, determining when and why economic impact data should be collected, and suggesting promising approaches and actions to support sustained measurement and use of this data in healthcare research and decision-making. A multi-stakeholder Steering Committee has been convened to guide development, with interviews and planned roundtables and consensus meetings to inform the framework.
