Objective: To describe the health and economic consequences of smoking model, a user friendly, web based tool, designed to estimate the health and economic outcomes associated with smoking and the benefits of smoking cessation.
Results: An overview of the development of the model equations and user interface is given, and data from the UK are presented as an example of the model outputs. These results show that a typical smoking cessation strategy costs approximately 1200 pounds sterling per life year saved and 22,000 pounds sterling per death averted.
Conclusions: The model successfully captures the complexity required to model smoking behaviour and associated mortality, morbidity, and health care costs. Furthermore, the interface provides the results in a simple and flexible way so as to be useful to a variety of audiences and to simulate a variety of smoking cessation methods.