Welcome

Welcome to the EUSCREEN cost-effectiveness model.

With this model, the cost-effectiveness of a hearing or vision screening programme for children can be calculated for your country or region, taking your local circumstances into account.

The model works like this: the user enters relevant parameters for an existing or hypothetical screening programme, such as how many children are born, which tests are used, which professionals perform the testing and so forth. The model subsequently simulates this screening programme and then calculates the total number of screens, number of referrals to diagnostic assessment, number of cases detected, costs per case of screening until referral, costs of diagnostic assessment, total costs, costs per test and costs per case detected. These results are presented to the user on the EUSCREEN Model Results page and can be downloaded, together with the simulation’s input data, as a pdf file. A simulation can be saved and loaded again later and changes can be made to study, for example, the effect of changing screening age or number of tests. Once three simulations have been saved, the results of these are presented side-by-side for easy comparison on the EUSCREEN Model Results page. The results are presented as graphs as well.

A good way to start with the model would be to first calculate the cost-effectiveness of your current screening programme if one is present, because data about the current screening programme will be most easily accessible to you. After this you can adjust variables to see what effect a change of screening test, age of screening, number of screening steps, etcetera will have.

It is important to realise that the accuracy of the prediction is dependent upon the accuracy of the variables you supply. Notably, the sensitivity and specificity of a screening test, performed by a given professional at a given age, are often unknown and you will have to make estimates. The specificity can be estimated if you know how many children were referred after an abnormal screening test and were later found to be OK. For estimation of the sensitivity, however, you need to know how many children with a normal screening test were found to have hearing impairment or amblyopia later in life.

For more information, please consult the EUSCREEN Manual for implementation or modification of child vision and hearing screening programmes.

If you would like to know what information is necessary to simulate a screening programme, click here.

The EUSCREEN team would like to thank everyone who has tested the model, as comments and feedback provided by the testers have been invaluable in further developing and refining the model.

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Neonatal hearing screening for well babies
Neonatal hearing screening for risk/NICU babies
Childhood hearing screening after the neonatal period
Photorefraction
Visual acuity screening