PECUNIA Reference Unit Costs Compendium (PECUNIA RUC Compendium)

The PECUNIA Reference Unit Costs Compendium (PECUNIA RUC Compendium) is a Microsoft Excel®-based multi-sectoral, multi-country database of unit costs comparable across countries and sectors and developed using standardized and scientifically validated methods (so called Reference Unit Costs (RUCs)) by the scientific partners of the PECUNIA Consortium between 2019 and 2021 based on the preliminary conceptual and methodological work conducted in 2018. The RUCs were developed using standardized and validated PECUNIA RUC Templates to introduce a higher degree of methodological harmonization and transparency in unit costs within and across sectors and countries. They are consistent with the harmonised PECUNIA Costing Concept (PECUNIA Care Atom, PECUNIA Service Lists, PECUNIA Coding System) and therefore with other PECUNIA Costing Tools (PECUNIA RUC Templates, PECUNIA RUM Instrument) to achieve comparability by referring to content rather than linguistic equivalence of services and other resource items. In the PECUNIA RUC Compendium, each listed RUC is complemented by multiple meta-data and a summary indicator of the overall level of certainty based on the robustness of the costing approach used and the outcome of the external validation process for fully transparency.

Version 1.0 of the PECUNIA RUC Compendium contains RUC estimates (in Euro, for year 2019) for a core set of service and resource use items commonly occurring in health economic evaluations with a societal perspective

• for multiple sectors: health and social care (HSC), education (ED), (criminal) justice (CJ), employment and productivity (EP), and patient, family and informal care (PFI);
• for multiple European countries (Austria, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, England, and Spain).

It is a living document planned to be regularly updated and expanded both in terms of the covered service and resource use items and the number of countries over time.