Cost-effectiveness of a collaborative care program for managing major depression and chronic musculoskeletal pain in primary care: Economic evaluation alongside a randomized controlled trial.

Background: We designed a collaborative care program for the integrated management of chronic musculoskeletal pain and depression, which frequently coexist in primary care patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of this program compared with care as usual.
Methods: We performed a cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a randomized clinical trial. Results were monitored over a 12-month period. The primary outcome was the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER). We performed cost-effectiveness analyses from the perspectives of the healthcare system and society using an intention-to-treat approach with imputation of missing values.
Results: We evaluated 328 patients (167 in the intervention group and 161 in the control group) with chronic musculoskeletal pain and major depression at baseline. From the healthcare system perspective, the mean incremental cost was €234 (p = .17) and the mean incremental effectiveness was 0.009 QALYs (p = .66), resulting in an ICER of €23,989/QALY. Costs from the societal perspective were €235 (p = .16), yielding an ICER of €24,102/QALY. These estimates were associated with a high degree of uncertainty illustrated on the cost-effectiveness plane.
Conclusions: Contrary to our expectations, the collaborative care program had no significant effects on health status, and although the additional costs of implementing the program compared with care as usual were not high, we were unable to demonstrate a favorable cost-effectiveness ratio, largely due to the high degree of uncertainty surrounding the estimates.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest E. Aragonès has received speaker/consultancy fees from Schwabe, Lündbeck, Grünental, and Pfizer. E. Sánchez-Iriso has received honoraria as a speaker from Pfizer. All authors declare that they have no other relationships, interests, or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.
(Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)