On July 14, the Special Interest Group on Economics of Obesity organized a pre-congress session. Marije Oosterhoff presented her study about the social return on investment of the ‘Healthy Primary School of the Future’. Marije also presented this study as part of the conference session on economic evaluations in non-traditional areas. 

On July 15, VHC colleagues presented their research in the interactive organized session “The Inclusion of Intersectoral Costs and Benefits of Health Interventions in Economic Evaluations”. Ruben Drost introduced his article on the conceptualizations of the societal perspective. Irina Pokhilenko and Luca Janssen displayed the preliminary findings of their studies on the identification and validation of items in the Education and the Criminal Justice sectors, which were conducted alongside the PECUNIA project. The session closed with an interactive part, in which the presenters got involved a lively discussion with the audience about the importance of intersectoral costs and benefits, and the barriers and facilitators to include these in economic evaluations. While the audience was well aware of the importance of these intersectoral costs and benefits, all agreed that valid methodological tools are lacking, on which the PECUNIA project is focusing.
A session was held on simulation-based approaches and extrapolation, where Marije Oosterhoff presented her work on exploring different extrapolation methods for weight trajectory analyses after childhood lifestyle interventions. Additionally, in the same session Bram Ramaekers presented his work on using a proposed standard template to increase the transparency and accessibility of survival analysis for decision analytic models.