Cost of Illness

Cost of illness analysis is a way of measuring medical and other costs resulting from a specific disease or condition. For example, heart disease in the United Statesexternal icon costs more than $321 billion each year—$193 billion in direct medical costs and $128 billion in lost productivity from early death.

Cost of illness analysis may include direct costs, productivity losses, and intangible costs of a disease or injury. Direct costs from a disease or condition may include:

• Medical costs, such as the cost of diagnostic tests, physician office visits, and drugs and medical supplies
• Non-medical costs, such as travel costs for obtaining care and related childcare costs.
• Productivity losses include impacts of patient and caregiver participation in an intervention, such as work or leisure time lost due to participation in the intervention. These costs are generally more complicated to measure than direct costs.

Cost of illness analysis provides the economic costs of an illness, injury, or risk factor.

Cost of illness analysis provides decision makers information on the economic burden of a disease or condition, which offers a sense of how big a problem is. This can, in turn, inform priority setting. However, as you can see from the example above, costs are only one part of the picture.