Health economics and integrated care: a growing and challenging relationship

In recent decades, the number of published health economic studies – especially economic evaluation studies – in the field of integrated care has increased substantially. One thesis summary has been published in the current issue of IJIC [1]. In general, these studies do not focus on developing innovative health economic methodologies, beyond the current state of art, but instead apply traditional methods usually developed within the medical field. The problem with this approach is that integrated care is often being evaluated with unsuitable health economic methods, as the main characteristics of integrated care models often differ from more traditional models of medical care. Consequently, a continued use of traditional health economic methods might result in invalid conclusions. This may hamper scientific research as well as policy-making on integrated care.