ABSTRACT
Health care has become a main economic expenditure in developed countries. This chapter discusses the costs, cost-effectiveness and budget impact of particle therapy. Resource costs are an often neglected component in the economic assessment of new radiotherapy treatments and technologies. Yet they are an indispensable first step in making investment cases, performing economic evaluations and budget impact analyses (BIA), and, in fine, supporting reimbursement setting. A model-based approach could be the solution to assess the cost-effectiveness of particle therapy for specific subgroups or for individual patients. Dose response and normal tissue complication probability models can be used to predict the incremental clinical benefit of particle therapy at the patient level, and weight this to its incremental cost to define cost-effectiveness. This approach also allows for selecting enriched cohorts of patients who are likely to benefit from protons and could be enrolled in more formal clinical trials.
