CHPPR Researchers Evaluating Cost Effectiveness of Proven Epilepsy Program in New Study
Published: January 27, 2025
A new study by CHPPR researchers aims to evaluate the economic feasibility of the evidence-based Management Information & Decision Support Epilepsy Tool (MINDSET) in community and healthcare settings. This study builds on an ongoing 10-year collaboration between CHPPR, the University of Arizona, and the Epilepsy Foundations of Texas on the MINDSET program.
“There is a dearth of research on the Cost Effectiveness of evidence-based epilepsy self-management programs like MINDSET,” said Ross Shegog, PhD, joint principal investigator on the study. “This project will contribute to our understanding of the financial sustainability of MINDSET and contribute to plans for scale-up of MINDSET implementation in community and clinical health care settings.”
MINDSET is a web-based, bilingual program available in Spanish and English designed to enable patients to more effectively management their epilepsy. Patients with epilepsy and providers can use the tool to generate a tailored action plan, based on the patient’s seizure, medication, and lifestyle self-management behaviors and their self-selected management goals. The Action Plan also provides recommendations for suitable epilepsy training programs catered to their self-management needs or to address co-morbidities of depression or memory problems and reports on the patient’s social determinants of health (such as housing, transportation, and financial assistance) to enable linkage to appropriate social services.
The program is part of the CDC-supported Managing Epilepsy Well (MEW) Network and has previously been demonstrated to be effective at increasing patient epilepsy self-management behaviors, feasible for use in clinics and by community health workers, and reliable for recommending linkage to other MEW programs. As this base of evidence around the efficacy of MINDSET matures, there is a need for guidance to help health care providers and decision-makers understand the costs and benefits of adopting, implementing, and maintaining the program in their practices.
This new study aims to fill this need through cost effectiveness analyses of MINDSET. Researchers will assess the implementation costs of the program and evaluate its cost effectiveness in community and clinical health care settings. Results will facilitate financial preparedness for new organizations wanting to implement MINDSET and establish the value of implementation.
This research addresses broader challenges around provider understanding of their financial preparedness to utilize evidence-based epilepsy self-management programs like MINDSET. Researchers will collaborate with MEW Network partners throughout the study and contribute findings to the network’s annual evaluations in order to build a better base of information on the cost effectiveness of these programs.
This project is funded by the CDC through a Prevention Research Center Special Interest Project (SIP) award U48DP006838 in collaboration with the University of Arizona Prevention Research Center. Investigators on the project are David Labiner, MD (Neurologist), Refugio Sepulveda, PhD (Assistant Research Professor), Ross Shegog, PhD (Behavioral Scientist), Suja Rajan, PhD (Economist), Robert Addy, PhD (Data Manager), and Katarzyna Czerniak, MPH (Project Coordinator).