Challenges in funding diabetes care: a health economic perspective

Diabetes mellitus - especially Type 2 diabetes - represents a major threat to public health in nearly all countries worldwide. The number of patients with diabetes is expected to rise to over 438 million by the year 2030. As healthcare resources are considered limited, there is a need for prioritization among the different, existing therapeutic options available for treating or preventing diseases in a given healthcare system. This article will highlight five particular challenges for evaluating complex therapeutic approaches in diabetes care, introducing the health economic fundamentals of cost-effectiveness assessment and the different concepts to determine a cost-effectiveness threshold, with a special focus on the situation in low-and middle-income countries.