Customising an international disease management model to the needs of individual countries. Application to upper gastrointestinal disease.

The baseline economic model for upper gastrointestinal (UGI) disease was developed in the context of patterns of care and resource use within the UK. It provided the opportunity to evaluate the extent to which an economic model developed in one country could be applied to meet the pharmacoeconomic information needs of decision makers in another. The choice of countries for analysis was restricted to countries within the International Gastro Primary Care Group (IGPCG) who had previously agreed on the appropriateness of the basic clinical algorithm to their domestic healthcare environment. This provided a potential sample of 9 countries (Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA) of which the UK, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland were chosen as providing a broad spectrum of strategic and operating environments in which to test the international transferability of the economic model. The process and results obtained provide valuable evidence of the extent to which economic analyses can be transferred across national borders.