CUTEHeart – Comparative use of technologies for coronary heart disease

CUTE Heart – Comparative use of technologies for coronary heart disease, is a project developed within the framework of CINTESIS whose principal investigator is Altamiro da Costa Pereira.

The project is funded by FCT / Harvard Medical School with 333,000 euros, of which more than 217,000 euros are managed by CINTESIS. CUTEHeart aims to compare the use of health technologies in the health systems of Portugal and the United States, namely in the treatment of Coronary Heart Disease, one of the leading causes of death in the Western world, with great economic impact reflected in both, direct and indirect costs.

In the long term, we hope to contribute to the development of a health services research program that explores the similarities and differences between the health systems of the two countries.

Different health systems have different abilities to adopt health technologies. These differences may me even more apparent among countries with contrasting gross domestic products, state-based vs. private-based health systems, scientific and professional development levels, and population epidemiological profiles. Nonetheless, whenever new technology is determined to be cost-effective compared to previous available care, there may be significant individual and societal benefits to its adoption and access independent of health system. The accurate determination of whether technologies are both clinically effective and cost-effective is thus of critical importance. The overall intent of most effectiveness measures is to provide an opportunity to improve the value of healthcare delivery by eliminating waste and possibly reducing costs where they are not justified. By merging data on clinical efficacy with cost to provide estimates of cost-effectiveness, health technology assessment (HTA) can be utilized to help generate evidence-based guidelines that support decision to utilize new technologies. The accurate evaluation of health technology requires an understanding of local disease epidemiology, institutional resources, specialized professional training, and clear political planning, surveillance, and evaluation instruments.

The goal of this study will be to compare the use of health technologies between the health systems, of the United States and Portugal, with a focus on the treatment of coronary heart disease (CHD). CHD apart from being highly prevalent and a major cause of death in Western countries, is also a leading problem because of the high economic burden it imparts on health systems. The economic cost of CHD relates not only to the direct cost to the healthcare system but also to loss of productivity, and to the provision of formal and informal patient care. However, current estimates of cost are limited to certain populations for whom this data is available (such as the Medicare population), and few have successfully compared CHD-attributable costs across distinct populations and health systems. We will empirically compare the use of technologies to treat coronary heart disease, the impact of selected CHD treatments on outcomes between two health care systems, and the associated costs. Our long-term goal is to develop a program of health services research, beyond CHD, that exploits similarities and differences between the US and Portuguese health care systems.

FCT / Harvard Medical School

333.327,00 €

217.122,00 €

Altamiro Costa Pereira (PI), Luís Filipe Azevedo, Alberto Freitas, Francisco Rocha Gonçalves, Armando Teixeira Pinto, Bruno Melica, Mariana Lobo

http://cuteheart.med.up.pt/