ArticlePharmacoEconomics - open2023
Cost Effectiveness of Strategies for Caring for Critically Ill Patients with COVID-19 in Tanzania.
Article in PharmacoEconomics - open, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Health Economic Evaluations in Intensive Care: An Updated Systematic Review.Critical care explorations · 2025Pooled it
- Diagnostics and treatments of COVID-19: two-year update to a living systematic review of economic evaluations.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2023Pooled it
- Cost-effectiveness of the IMPALA monitoring system for hospitalised children in low-resource settings: a pragmatic before-and-after study.BMJ paediatrics open · 2026Article
- Cost per outcome of ICU care under Biju Swasthya Kalyan Yojana in Odisha.The Indian journal of medical research · 2026Article
- Clinical outcomes and factors associated with mortality among adults admitted to the intensive care unit at Hawassa University Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, Ethiopia: retrospective chart review.BMC anesthesiology · 2026Article
- Hospital burden of critical illness across global settings: a point prevalence and cohort study in Malawi, Sri Lanka and Sweden.BMJ global health · 2025Observational
- Third delay in care of critically ill patients: a qualitative investigation of public hospitals in Kenya.BMJ open · 2024Article
- Receive, Sustain, and Flow: A simple heuristic for facilitating the identification and treatment of critically ill patients during their hospital journeys.Journal of global health · 2023Article
- Hospital care for critical illness in low-resource settings: lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic.BMJ global health · 2023Review
- The World Health Assembly resolution on integrated emergency, critical, and operative care for universal health coverage and protection from health emergencies: a golden opportunity to attenuate the global burden of acute and critical illness.Intensive care medicine · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe resources for critical care are limited in many settings, exacerbating the significant morbidity and mortality associated with critical illness. Budget constraints can lead to choices between investing in advanced critical care (e.g. mechanical ventilators in intensive care units) or more basic critical care such as Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC; e.g. vital signs monitoring, oxygen therapy, and intravenous fluids).
methodsWe investigated the cost effectiveness of providing EECC and advanced critical care in Tanzania in comparison with providing 'no critical care' or 'district hospital-level critical care' using coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a tracer condition. We developed an open-source Markov model ( https://github.com/EECCnetwork/POETIC_CEA ) to estimate costs and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) averted, using a provider perspective, a 28-day time horizon, patient outcomes obtained from an elicitation method involving a seven-member expert group, a normative costing study, and published literature. We performed a univariate and probabilistic sensitivity analysis to assess the robustness of our results. ,
resultsEECC is cost effective 94% and 99% of the time when compared with no critical care (incremental cost-effectiveness ratio [ICER] $37 [-$9 to $790] per DALY averted) and district hospital-level critical care (ICER $14 [-$200 to $263] per DALY averted), respectively, relative to the lowest identified estimate of the willingness-to-pay threshold for Tanzania ($101 per DALY averted). Advanced critical care is cost effective 27% and 40% of the time, when compared with the no critical care or district hospital-level critical care scenarios, respectively.
conclusionFor settings where there is limited or no critical care delivery, implementation of EECC could be a highly cost-effective investment. It could reduce mortality and morbidity for critically ill COVID-19 patients, and its cost effectiveness falls within the range considered 'highly cost effective'. Further research is needed to explore the potential of EECC to generate even greater benefits and value for money when patients with diagnoses other than COVID-19 are accounted for.
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.