Cost-effectiveness of the HIT programme in patients with schizophrenia and persistent auditory hallucinations.

Objective: To examine the cost-effectiveness of Hallucination focused Integrative Treatment (HIT) in patients with schizophrenia and a history of persistent auditory hallucinations.
Method: Costs, in and outside the health care sector, and outcomes were registered prospectively during a period of 18 months for patients who received the HIT programme and for patients in the care as usual (CAU) condition. The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) was used as main outcome measure in the cost-effectiveness analysis. Bootstrap analyses provided additional information on the skewly distributed costs.
Results: Mean costs per patient in the HIT group (18,237 dollars) were lower than the mean costs per patient in the CAU group (21,436 dollars). Results of the PANSS were slightly in favour of the HIT group.
Conclusion: There appears to be no significant cost-effectiveness advantage of the HIT programme over CAU. Additional analyses indicated that future application of the HIT programme will, in most cases, lead to a reduction of (non) medical costs.