Draft Guidelines for Estimating Expenditure by Disease, Age and Gender under the System of Health Accounts (sha) Framework

1. This paper summarizes the methodology for general Cost of Illness (COI) studies and provides guidelines that others can use to set up and carry out a similar study. Special attention is given to the need to use the OECD’s System of Health Accounts (SHA) as a framework for international reporting on outcomes of a national COI analysis. The paper is based on experiences of the authors with a series of Cost of Illness studies in the Netherlands. It contains extensive examples taken from the Dutch 2003 COI-study.