The New Dutch Guideline for Economic Evaluations in Healthcare: Taking the Societal Perspective to the Next Level

Objectives To promote uniform and high-quality economic evaluations, several national Health Technology Assessment (HTA) bodies have developed guidelines. Because of ongoing (methodological) developments within the field of HTA and economic evaluations, the Dutch health economic guideline needed a revision. This article briefly discusses the process of the latest revision, highlights most important changes, and presents a research agenda with topics for which more research is desired. Methods An independent committee of 8 Dutch academic HTA experts was installed to advise the National Health Care Institute on this revision. A survey was sent to all relevant stakeholders to obtain input on adjustments needed. The committee discussed the results from the survey and during 4 meetings, formulated its advice accordingly. Results The most important revisions are a lowered discount rate for costs, additional guidance concerning expert opinion and expert elicitation, the inclusion of health-related quality of life of informal caregivers, performing probabilistic analysis for the main results, indirect medical costs in life years gained, additional guidance on empirical economic evaluations and the inclusion of value of information analyses. Furthermore, the costing manual has been updated as well, including updated reference prices and additional price categories related to educational and judicial costs. Conclusions The revised Dutch guideline provides up-to-date guidance for conducting economic evaluations in The Netherlands that can inform health policy decisions from a broad societal perspective.