Planning, implementing, and evaluating Hepatitis C virus elimination via collaborative community-based care cascade: age–period–cohort model for estimating demand from antecedent anti-HCV survey

Background: Estimating the demand for HCV care cascade plays an important role in planning, monitoring, and assessing the performance of introducing a new community-based hepatitis C virus (HCV) elimination program but such an analytic and systematic approach has been barley addressed. Methods: A new collaborative care program for HCV elimination in the Changhua Community of Taiwan has been offered to a total of 895,353 residents since 2018. To grasp the variation of demand for HCV care cascade across demographic and geographic features in the planning stage, we applied the age–period–cohort spatial model to the antecedent anti-HCV survey enrolling 123,617 participants aged 30 years or older between 2005 and 2018. Based on this precise denominator, we then employed a “before-and-after” study design to routinely evaluate whether the WHO criteria of 90% RNA positive diagnosis and 80% successful treatments could be reached. Results: The overall demand for HCV care cascade was 4.28% (HCV infection) of the underlying population but a declining trend was noted. The early cohort had a higher demand, whereas the demand of the young cohort decreased with each passing year. The demand also differed by township. The demand, allowing for these variations, for antiviral treatment was 22,362, yielding the WHO target of 12,880 for achieving HCV elimination. With 11,844 successful treatments, the effectiveness of elimination has already reached 92% (11,844/12,880) by the end of 2022. Conclusions: The demand for HCV care cascade allows health care decision-makers to timely and properly assess the performance of a novel community-based collaborative care program in achieving HCV elimination.