This article describes the components that should be included as indirect costs to be consistent with economic theory in studies conducted from a societal perspective. The recently proposed method of how to estimate indirect costs, the friction-cost approach, is shown to exclude many aspects of these indirect cost components. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that this approach rests on very stro...

BACKGROUND Pediatric antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been shown to substantially reduce morbidity and mortality in HIV-infected infants and children. To accurately project program costs, analysts need accurate estimations of antiretroviral drug (ARV) costs for children. However, the costing of pediatric antiretroviral therapy is complicated by weight-based dosing recommendations which change a...

Estimation of the effect of one treatment compared to another in the absence of randomization is a common problem in biostatistics. An increasingly popular approach involves instrumental variables-variables that are predictive of who received a treatment yet not directly predictive of the outcome. When treatment is binary, many estimators have been proposed: method-of-moments estimators using a...

OBJECTIVE We sought to estimate the impact of corporate health-management and risk-reduction programs for The Dow Chemical Company by using a prospective return-on-investment (ROI) model. METHODS The risk and expenditure estimates were derived from multiple regression analyses showing relationships between worker demographics, health risks, and medical expenditures. RESULTS A "break-even" s...

Analysis of health care cost data is often complicated by a high level of skewness, heteroscedastic variances and the presence of missing data. Most of the existing literature on cost data analysis have been focused on modeling the conditional mean. In this paper, we study a weighted quantile regression approach for estimating the conditional quantiles health care cost data with missing covaria...

BACKGROUND Community home-based care is the Botswana Government's preferred means of providing care for people living with HIV (PLHIV). However, primary (family members) or volunteer (community members) caregivers experience poverty, are socially isolated, endure stigma and psychological distress, and lack basic care-giving education. Community home-based care also imposes considerable costs on...

OBJECTIVE Asthma is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and is associated with significant economic burden worldwide. The objectives of this study were to map current resource use associated with the disease management and to estimate the annual direct and indirect costs per adult patient with asthma. METHODS A Delphi panel with seven leading pulmonologists was conducted. A semistructure...