Fig. 2

Decision-analytic model for the economic burden of migraines 

Note: This study simulated patients’ clinical pathways, considering outpatient visits at both public and private facilities. Since the unit costs of health services in China are available from an official tariff exclusively for public facilities, the study focused on detailing the outpatient visit pathway within these public healthcare settings. Typically, this pathway begins with an outpatient consultation, followed by diagnostic tests. The costs of these two components were aggregated to calculate the costs for outpatient visits at public facilities. Regarding outpatient visits at private facilities, there is no officially standardised tariff for healthcare services in China, as the pricing in these facilities is influenced by market forces. Nevertheless, the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China annually compiles an all-cause average fee per outpatient visit, encompassing outpatient consultations and diagnostic tests, across all providers [34]. This average fee per outpatient visit could be used to calculate the costs for outpatient visits at private facilities 

This model’s validation process included evaluations of face validity and internal validity, taking into account its realisability. Following established guidelines for model validation [32], the evaluation of face validity was carried out by the six experts mentioned in Supplementary Material 1, and the evaluation of internal validity was carried out by our research team