On the 28th of November, we organized our Quality of Life Cluster meeting and connected with colleagues from various EU-funded projects. Our focus? tackling the complexities of health economic evaluations performed alongside multinational randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Besides the methodological challenges of setting up a robust multinational RCT, specific hurdles arise when conducting health economic evaluations across different countries:

– Differences in preferences and perspectives: Should the analysis take a societal, healthcare, payer, hospital, or patient perspective?
– Challenges in resource collection and valuation: what resource use should be measured, and how can we ensure comparability in the valuation of costs and effects between countries?
– Limited insights on how these choices influence costs, effects, and overall outcomes of the analysis.
– Analytical complexities: Can data be pooled across countries, or should they remain split? And as long as we do not have convincing answers to the previous questions, should we apply advanced statistical techniques to derive country-specific estimates?

These are just a few of the pressing questions we discussed during the meeting, and we’d like to hear your thoughts: What approaches have worked in your projects to address these challenges? Feel free to reach out to Aniek Schouten (A.E.M.Schouten-10@umcutrecht.nl), who is writing a PhD on this topic —collaboration is key to advancing our collective knowledge!