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A shortcoming of many economic evaluations is that they do not include all medical costs in life-years gained (also termed indirect medical costs). One of the reasons for this is the practical difficulties in the estimation of these costs. While some methods have been proposed to estimate indirect medical costs in a standardized manner, these methods fail to take into account that not all costs in life-years gained can be estimated in such a way. Costs in lifeyears gained caused by diseases related to the intervention are difficult to estimate in a standardized manner and should always be explicitly modelled. However, costs of all other (unrelated) diseases in life-years gained can be estimated in such a way.

We propose a conceptual model of how to estimate costs of unrelated diseases in life-years gained in a standardized manner. Furthermore, we describe how we estimated the parameters of this …