The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (SFOPH) commissioned a Health Technology Assessment (HTA) regarding iron therapy in symptomatic patients with iron deficiency without anemia (iron deficiency no anemia, IDNA) to the Basel Institute for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CEB) and the Winterthur Institute of Health Economics (WIG). The scope, which describes the background of the HTA and elucidates the general approach, has been published on the SFOPH homepage.
This HTA followed a step-wise approach. The aim of the first step was to assess the clinical effectiveness of iron therapy in symptomatic patients with IDNA, and to identify symptomatic populations that benefit from the therapy. In this first step, the clinical effectiveness of iron therapy was assessed in comparison to any other non-iron treatment or placebo, irrespective of the route of iron administration. This step was conducted by CEB, and the results are summarized in chapter 2 of this document.
In the second step, which will be conducted by WIG, the economic evaluation shall compare parenteral versus oral iron therapy for those populations, for which a significant treatment effect of iron therapy (parenteral or oral) versus control could be identified during the first step. Based on the effectiveness results, the scope of the economic evaluation is outlined in chapter 4. Section 4.1 defines the objective of the economic evaluation. Section 4.2 defines the population, the intervention, the comparator, and the outcome (PICO) which will be evaluated. A screening of health economic literature and publicly available HTAs for economic studies comparing parenteral with oral iron therapy is presented in section 4.3, and section 4.4 concludes with the outline of the research methodology of the economic evaluation
