A Literature Review on Influenza Treatment Costing Studies

Abstract

Many researches were conducted about the burden created by influenza from an economic point of view, but they haven't yet to be specifically systematically reviewed. Our aim was to review the literature on economic burden studies of influenza focusing on direct cost (treatment cost) and indirect cost (related to school or workplace absenteeism). We conducted a systematic literature search mainly on three databases (PubMed, Science Direct and Cochrane database) on the economic burden of influenza till the end of November 2015. the publications have been carefully selected to shed light on direct and indirect costs of influenza, influenza-like-illness and pandemic influenza. There were 48 studies in 15 countries across five continents that can satisfy such criteria and those were used for in-depth statistic in our systematic review. The number of articles, which is conducted in America or using US dollar, were 19 and 37 out of 48, respectively. It can be noticed that most of the studies (27 researches , an equivalent to 56.3 percentages) discussed both direct and indirect cost whereas direct cost and indirect cost studies were 15 (29.2%) and 2 (4.2 %). There were differences between results (in direct and indirect cost) of studies due to dissimilarity in researched country, targeted population or reported year. This review will help us to have an overview on influenza economic burden. Otherwise, it also provides necessary statistic about current status in cost of influenza studies over the world. From that, investigator who want to research on this field, can follow the previous studies for building their own working.

Health care costs of influenza-related episodes in high income countries: A systematic review

“…Previous reviews have analyzed the economic burden of influenza on both direct healthcare costs and indirect societal costs [ 6 – 8 ]. For example Peasah et al reports nationally-aggregated and per capita costs of hospitalization events, outpatient services and productivity losses [ 8 ], whereas Dao et al collected data on direct medical and non-medical costs as well as indirect costs [ 6 ]. These previous works generally provide aggregate estimates per macro-categories of costs, per capita costs and average cost per item.…”