Equity and the Socioeconomic Impact of Disease Management Programmes in Denmark (EQUIP)

Description: This project focuses on two important health and economic challenges. First, the importance of complex interdisciplinary treatment programmes is analysed. Interdisciplinary treatment programmes are a nationwide and cross-sectoral concept for developing systematic and evidence-based treatment procedures. Based on a generic model for interdisciplinary health programmes, detailed procedure descriptions have been prepared for several chronic disorders including diabetes, lumbar spine disorders, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, schizophrenia and cancer rehabilitation. Such cross-cutting interventions are of great importance, but they also represent a challenge in regard to traditional evaluation techniques. The project analyses the development and implementation of treatment programmes in Denmark. Second, their effect is assessed for selected patient groups using health records and survey data. The second main purpose of the project is to focus on equality in the health effects as part of assessing the health economics of treatment programmes. Although health economic methods are good at assessing cost–effectiveness, they are less well developed for assessing whether new therapies have equally beneficial effects for different patient groups. The project will demonstrate how equality can be included as part of the health economics assessment and how this can affect the assessment of health interventions. Overall, the project provides thorough and innovative input for assessing socioeconomic effects using health research for developing and implementing programmes for managing major noncommunicable disease groups in Denmark.