Published: 02-12-2016

One of the challenges when developing an economic model is finding jurisdiction-specific data on direct and indirect costs and resource use for a particular disease. We created the heoro.com database to make this process much faster and, therefore, cheaper. In this blog we describe the evidence map we've created for economic burden studies in pancreatitis.

Here's how we did it:

First, we searched for Pancreatitis as the disease, selected Costs and Resource use as the main study type, then selected Direct costs OR Indirect costs OR Resource use from the Costs & Resource Use sub-menu that appeared. The screengrab below shows you exactly how we did this.

We exported the results of this search so we could import the details into citation software and a spreadsheet to process the details. We went through the 197 abstracts identified by the search to categorise them by geographical locations and types of pancreatitis reported in the abstracts. We then created a pivot table to calculate the number of abstracts for the three  study subtypes for each geographical location and key subtypes of pancreatitis to see the distribution of abstracts from each country that reported each type of economic data. The whole process took approximately 5 hours from start to finish.

We found 197 abstracts in total. Of these, 95 reported direct costs, 11 reported indirect costs (including productivity data) and 180 reported resource use. Of the subtypes of pancreatitis explored in the abstracts, 48 were about biliary pancreatitis as a complication of gallstones, and 19 were on alcoholic pancreatitis.

The most common geographical settings overall were the United States, with 65 abstracts probably or definitely set in that country, followed by China with 21 abstracts, the United Kingdom (16 abstracts), Germany (11), Italy (10) and the Netherlands (8). Fourteen abstracts were literature reviews or other studies with an international reach. The United States was also the most common provider of data on direct costs and resource use, but European countries, in particular the Netherlands, Germany and the UK, produced more abstracts reporting indirect costs than did the US.

The results are shown in the tables below.

Geographical distribution of abstracts reporting resource use, direct costs and indirect costs in pancreatitis

Types of economic outcomes reported for subtypes of pancreatitis