Health Technology Wales (HTW) has helped address the challenges of bringing high value cell and gene therapies to NHS patients by creating a micro-costing toolkit.
HTW, which assesses non-medicine health technologies in Wales, worked alongside the Midlands and Wales Advanced Therapy Treatment Centre (MW-ATTC) and a network of specialists who form part of the wider ATTC network.
Economic evidence needs to be generated early in the development of advanced therapies, to facilitate health economic analysis and enable support for market access and approvals. A central challenge in assessing the cost effectiveness of an intervention is the accurate identification, measurement, and valuation of healthcare resource use. HTW’s micro-costing toolkit was produced to address this challenge and to facilitate the calculation of the total costs of advanced therapies.
HTW performed a comprehensive systematic literature review of the resource collection methods employed in previous economic analyses of advanced therapies. The data collected and expert input were then combined to develop the micro-costing toolkit. The micro-costing toolkit aims to facilitate the assessment of the full cost of delivering advanced therapies to the NHS. This could inform future assessments of whether different advanced therapies deliver sufficient value for money.
The micro-costing toolkit breaks down the delivery of advanced therapies into different phases, from patient suitability assessment through to routine monitoring post-treatment, to facilitate the bringing together of costs incurred at different times and in different parts of the system. The micro-costing toolkit is intended to be adaptable; for example, the user is able to select the type of advanced therapy (in vivo Gene Therapy Medicinal Product (GTMP), ex vivo GTMP, Somatic Cell Therapy Medicinal Product or Tissue Engineered Product). It is also designed to be flexible to the different types of data which may be available. It can accommodate detailed micro-costing or higher-level top-down costing, where available. The toolkit could inform data collection alongside randomised controlled trials or could be filled in retrospectively by health economists undertaking economic analyses.
The micro-costing toolkit can be downloaded here, and a webinar recording to demonstrate how the micro-costing toolkit might be used in practice can be accessed here.
