This report presents a consensus-based framework to help researchers, funders, and decision-makers systematically identify, define, and measure the full range of economic impacts that health conditions and healthcare encounters impose on patients and their caregivers—going beyond traditional direct medical costs.
Key elements of the report include:
- Patient-Centered Focus: Placing patients and caregivers at the center of understanding economic impacts, emphasizing lived experience and equity in research design.
- Identifies Six Areas of Economic Impact: Direct medical costs, non-clinical healthcare costs, caregiver and family impacts, social impacts, ability to work, and education and job impacts.
- Framework Principles: Encourages authentic partnership with patients/caregivers, clarify research goals collaboratively, integrate health equity, and use mixed methods to capture complex, real-world economic outcomes.
The Framework is intended to guide study design and prioritization in comparative effectiveness and outcomes research, evaluation of evidence adequacy regarding patient economic impacts, and future research collaborations to expand data on under-measured impacts and enhance measurement methods, especially involving underrepresented communities.
In essence, the report calls for consistent, patient-centered measurement of broad economic consequences of illness and care—to inform better health policy and value assessment that reflects what truly matters to patients and caregivers.
