Background and Aim: Men with prostate cancer in active surveillance are proactively monitored with regular prostate-antigen blood tests and biopsies to detect possible disease progression, with active (curative) treatment started as required. We examined the cost-effectiveness of the Navigate online decision aid guiding the choice of management option for men with prostate cancer compared with usual care (no decision aid).
Methods: A decision-analytic cohort model was constructed over a 10-year time horizon. Navigate trial data (n = 302) and estimates from relevant published studies were used for model inputs. The model incorporated costs and benefits over the short and long term, with disease progression occurring in some men. Incremental costs and health effects (quality-adjusted life years, QALYs) were calculated for the two strategies from a government healthcare cost perspective. One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were undertaken to address uncertainty in model inputs.
Results: The estimated mean cost per patient in the Navigate strategy was $8,789 (95% Uncertainty Interval (UI): $7,410, $10,273) and mean QALYs were 7.08 (95% UI: 6.72, 7.36) compared with $9,373 (95% UI: $8,081, $10,808) and 7.03 (95% UI: 6.67, 7.30) for the usual care group. The Navigate strategy produced cost-savings and higher QALYs, albeit small differences in both over 10 years. The findings were sensitive to the uptake of active surveillance, the cost of active treatment (i.e., surgery, radiation therapy), model duration and the probability of disease progression after active treatment, but variation in these did not alter the overall findings. The likelihood of Navigate being cost-effective was 99.8% at the acceptable level in Australia.
Conclusion: Using an online decision aid tool for men with prostate cancer appears to be cost-effective relative to usual practice in the Australian healthcare system, driven by the high acceptance and uptake of active surveillance.