(Pharmaco)economic evaluations for mental health related services: the PECUNIA project

Mental health disorders affect large proportions of the general public resulting in serious cost consequences even beyond the health care sector. The PECUNIA project (EU H2020 grant agreement No 779292) aims to establish standardised costing and outcome assessment measures for optimised healthcare provision in the EU for multi-sectoral, multi-national and multi-person (pharmaco)economic evaluations using selected mental health disorders as illustrative examples.Harmonised Identification, Definition, Measurement and Valuation of service costs in multiple sectors (health care, social care, criminal justice, education, productivity, patient, family). Reviews and surveys of mental health related services and other resource use in six European countries (AT, DE, ES, HU, NL, UK) to develop a new harmonised costing concept and related tools.We identified many taxonomical and conceptual discrepancies which currently hinder harmonized costing efforts and comparability of economic evaluations/HTAs across countries and sectors. The 'PECUNIA care atom', a new multi-sectoral costing concept forms the basis of resource item classification and international coding of mental health related services using the DESDE-PECUNIA system. Linked, harmonized tools such as the PECUNIA-European Resource Use Measurement instrument and the PECUNIA-European Reference Unit Costing Templates have been developed and are currently deployed in six countries to establish a PECUNIA-European Unit Cost Compendium alongside pan-European outcome evaluation methods.The PECUNIA tools will lead to better understanding of the variations in costs and outcomes of mental health services/interventions within and across countries, and improve the feasibility, quality, comparability and transferability of (pharmaco)economic evaluations and HTAs in Europe. They also allow the harmonized measurement of broader economic and societal impacts of mental health services.The PECUNIA project developed compatible European multi-sectoral, multi-national and multi-person costing and outcome assessment tools.Methods \amp; tools allow the harmonised measurement of broader economic \amp; societal impacts of mental health related services, and improve the transferability \amp; comparability of economic evaluations/HTAs.