D4.5 Publicly accessible software tool

This file describes how to use the software code supporting a new and flexible approach to the Budget Impact Analysis (BIA) of innovative pharmaceutical products, as described in Deliverable 4.4 of the FLASH project (“Flexible approaches to support health through financing”; https://flash-project.com/). The aim is to provide a tool to improve payers' and manufacturers' ability to predict the budget impact of pharmaceutical innovations over time in situations that present complexity that more standard approaches do not fully address. This is done by relying on the properties of Markov models, which are widely employed in economic evaluations of new technologies but not in budget-impact analyses. A key characteristic of the tool is that it is not product-specific, in that it can be adapted to estimate the budget impact of several innovations, simply by providing the relevant input for the situation of interest.The code was developed using MATLAB®, but it is written so as to be also compatible with the free and open-source software application OCTAVE. The model relies on a number of assumptions, which are detailed in Deliverable 4.4. Any future contributions from other authors that aim to relax some of these assumptions, correct mistakes, or improve the tool in general are very welcome. New versions of the code, if any, will be made available through the Zenodo page of the FLASH project.