A regression framework for a probabilistic measure of cost-effectiveness
Abstract
To make informed health policy decisions regarding a treatment, we must consider both its cost and its clinical effectiveness. In past work, we introduced the net benefit separation (NBS) as a novel measure of cost-effectiveness. The NBS is a probabilistic measure that characterizes the extent to which a treated patient will be more likely to experience benefit as compared to an untreated patient. Due to variation in treatment response across patients, uncovering factors that influence cost-effectiveness can assist policy makers in population-level decisions regarding resource allocation. In this paper, we introduce a regression framework for NBS in order to estimate covariate-specific NBS and find determinants of variation in NBS. Our approach is able to accommodate informative cost censoring through inverse probability weighting techniques, and addresses confounding through a semiparametric standardization procedure. Through simulations, we show that NBS regression performs well in a variety of common scenarios. We apply our proposed regression procedure to a realistic simulated data set as an illustration of how our approach could be used to investigate the association between cancer stage, comorbidities and cost-effectiveness when comparing adjuvant radiation therapy and chemotherapy in post-hysterectomy endometrial cancer patients.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2101.10466,
title = {A regression framework for a probabilistic measure of cost-effectiveness},
author = {Nicholas Illenberger and Nandita Mitra and Andrew J. Spieker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.10466},
year = {2021}
}