Why carry out this study?

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a global crisis impacting individual and population health and the economy more broadly.

As the treatment landscape continues to evolve, there is a need for a common cost-effectiveness framework to ensure adherence to modeling best practices and incorporation of the most relevant clinical parameters when assessing the value of COVID-19 treatments.

We describe a cost-effectiveness framework for evaluating acute treatments for hospitalized patients with COVID-19, considering a broad spectrum of potential treatment profiles and perspectives within the US healthcare system.

What was learned from the study?

Viewing results in aggregate, we find that treatments that confer at least a mortality benefit are likely to be cost-effective, as all deterministic and sensitivity analyses results fell far below US willingness-to-pay thresholds from both a US health payer and societal perspective. Even with conservative assumptions on societal impact, we find that the societal perspective consistently produced ICERs that were 40–50% lower than ICERs for the health payer perspective.

Effective COVID-19 treatments for hospitalized patients may not only reduce disease burden but also represent good value for the health system.

We also demonstrate that, despite limited data available on the long-term impact of invasive mechanical ventilation and productivity of COVID-19 patients post-discharge, it is possible to estimate the cost-effectiveness of inpatient treatments for COVID-19 from a societal perspective using a conservative approach to help guide future decisions on allocation of healthcare resources.