Five to eight percent of the world's population, about five million people in German-speaking countries, suffer from chronic inflammatory diseases that are mediated by our immune system. For these patient groups, sufficient vaccination protection is particularly important, as they have an increased risk of contracting infections due to their disease and the immunosuppressive therapy often associated with it.
Nevertheless, these people in particular may not be sufficiently vaccinated; so far, only a few studies have addressed this topic and many questions remain unanswered, especially about factors influencing vaccination rates in MAC patients.
Against this background, vaccination barriers and obstacles are to be identified and recommendations for action to increase vaccination rates in patients with these diseases are to be developed. In a first step, the vaccination rates and corresponding influencing factors, the vaccination effectiveness and the occurrence of severe vaccination reactions are to be identified in routine data from health insurance companies for MAC patients.
In addition to the data analysis, the researchers will conduct interviews with MAC patients and treating physicians. They will also carry out health economic evaluations on costs and finally develop target group-oriented information material. Within OZ 1, for MAC patients vaccination rates, vaccination effectiveness and the occurrence of severe vaccination reactions are to be identified in routine data.
In addition, health economic evaluation costs will be carried out. For an unbiased cost comparison, balanced groups of vaccinated and non-vaccinated MAC patients are created using suitable matching or weighting procedures such as propensity score matching or entropy balancing.
