Partners SEPI and MME conducted a Health Technology Assessment (HTA) study to assess the potential of the BD4QoL platform when used as a tool to enhance return to work (RTW) in Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) survivors.
Work conducted by SEPI in Task T7.2 of the BD4QoL project and the literature show that HNC survivors’ occupational status is an important quality of life outcome to be considered in survivorship care.
The prospective use of BD4QoL to address this objective is also supported by scientific literature, which confirms how existing interventions for RTW in cancer survivors include many of the components that are also included in BD4QoL.
SEPI extracted relevant parameters from the occupational dataset on HNC survivors they created in Task T7.2, and MME used such parameters to develop a set of related decision analytics Markov models that simulate and quantitatively assess the impact of using the various BD4QoL components (symptoms management chatbot, motivational chatbot, behaviour self-measurement) to improve RTW in HNC survivors.
Running these models and computing their Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio (ICER) allowed to draw several conclusions that will be important to inform future plans to exploit the results of the BD4QoL research, i.e.:
- Intervening on RTW brings benefits to society by reducing the productivity losses due to survivors not returning to work or making less if they do. The same improvements directly translate into individual benefits for survivors themselves, in terms of increased income.
- Although the benefits vary considerably, depending on the actual effectiveness of the approach, in most instances the solution remains dominant – i.e. better than current standard of care – establishing a relevant use case, deserving further examination.
- The actual yearly cost per individual can be estimated up to a maximum of 500 €/year, while still maintaining economic dominance, as it returns larger value in terms of recovered productivity, with benefits for both individuals and society.
