The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US “productivity miracle” is due to a natural advantage of being located in the US then we would not expect to see any evidence of it for US establishments located abroad. This paper shows in f...

Dual-chamber pacing is a promising treatment for patients with very frequent vasovagal syncope, but its cost utility is unknown. We report that the incremental cost per quality-adjusted life-year gained is $13,159 Canadian dollars (about $8,600 US dollars), and therefore this pacemaker therapy for vasovagal syncope has a favorable cost-utility ratio.

BACKGROUND Interventions designed to narrow the gap between research findings and clinical practice may be effective, but also costly. Economic evaluations are necessary to judge whether such interventions are worth the effort. We have evaluated the economic effects of a tailored intervention to support the implementation of guidelines for the use of antihypertensive and cholesterol-lowering dr...

Despite the importance of hemodialysis vascular access, the cost of vascular access care has not been studied in detail. A prospective cost analysis was performed among incident hemodialysis patients to determine the cost of vascular access care overall and on the basis of access type. Detailed clinical and demographic information, as well as data on access type, was collected for all local inc...

The history of polio vaccination in the United States spans 50 years and includes different phases of the disease, multiple vaccines, and a sustained significant commitment of resources. We estimated cost-effectiveness ratios and assessed the net benefits of polio vaccination applicable at various points in time from the societal perspective and we discounted these back to appropriate points in...

Quansheng Ren, Kiran M. Kolwankar, 2 Areejit Samal, 3 and Jürgen Jost 4 Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Inselstr. 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany Department of Physics, Ramniranjan Jhunjhunwala College, Ghatkopar (W), Mumbai 400 086, India Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques, CNRS and Univ Paris-Sud, UMR 8626, F-91405 Orsay, France The Santa Fe Institute...

BACKGROUND About 80% of cervical cancers occur in less-developed countries. This disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in such countries is due mainly to the lack of well-organized screening programs. Several cervical cancer screening strategies have been proposed as more cost-effective than cytology screening. We compared the costs and benefits of different strategies and their effectiven...

BACKGROUND Fixed-dose combination of isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine (ISDN/HYD) improved clinical outcomes in the African-American Heart Failure Trial (A-HeFT). We assessed the resource use, costs of care, and cost-effectiveness of ISDN/HYD therapy in the A-HeFT trial population. METHODS AND RESULTS We obtained resource use data from A-HeFT, assigning costs through the use of US federal sour...