Disruptive therapeutic innovation and the opportunity to eliminate a chronic disease - The issue of chronic hepatitis C in Spain.

Public funding decisions must be guided by criteria of scientific evidence, cost-effectiveness and economic evaluation. As an increase in health-effectiveness provided by therapeutic innovations can also substantially raise the cost, the cost-effectiveness analysis estimating this increase in the cost per unit of health gained compared to the previous technologies should be part of the economic evaluation. The measure of effectiveness most frequently used in health economic evaluations is the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY). Data from a Markov analysis presented by Turnes et al. in the last issue of this journal comparing two scenarios, pre-DAA and post-DAA in Spain is discussed in this document.