Economic outcomes and costs in the treatment of schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is an expensive illness, with hospitalization representing a major cost of treatment. To evaluate new drugs and management strategies for schizophrenia, we must have reliable measures of outcomes and costs. Cost-outcome evaluations are particularly important because they allow comparisons of the potential costs and consequences of various strategies. The best estimates of outcome use batteries of instruments to score the wellbeing of patients and their caregivers. Dimensions of well-being include clinical status, functional status, access to resources and opportunities, subjective quality of life, family well-being, and patient satisfaction with services. The best overall outcome may involve trade-offs between different dimensions (eg, moving a patient from hospital-based care to community-based care may improve the patient's quality of life but increase family burden). Although measuring direct costs of schizophrenia is reasonably straightforward, indirect costs are more difficult to measure. The cost of pain and suffering (intangible costs) caused by schizophrenia for an individual patient or family is seldom assessed, although quality-of-life measures may provide some information. Increased costs of treatments in one area (eg, medication) may well be offset by reduced expenditures in another (eg, hospitalization). Trade-offs between different dimensions and different schizophrenia management agencies are only possible once the boundaries between these have been made clear by proper economic evaluations.