OBJECTIVES Depressive disorders are significant causes of disease burden and are associated with substantial economic costs. It is therefore important to design a healthcare system that can effectively manage depression at sustainable costs. This article computes the benefit-to-cost ratio of the current Dutch healthcare system for depression, and investigates whether offering more online preven...

BACKGROUND Infants who survive advanced necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) at the time of birth are at increased risk of having poor long term physiological and neurodevelopmental growth. The economic implications of the long term morbidity in these children have not been studied to date. This paper compares the long term healthcare costs beyond the initial hospitalization period incurred by medic...

BACKGROUND Given the scale of the current obesity epidemic and associated health consequences there has been increasing concern about the economic burden placed on society in terms of direct healthcare costs and indirect societal costs. In the Republic of Ireland these costs were estimated at €1.13 billion for 2009. The total direct healthcare costs for six major obesity related conditions (cor...

Healthcare costs are unsustainable. The authors propose a solution to control costs without rationing (deliberate withholding of effective care) or payment reductions to doctors and hospitals. Three physician-led strategies comprise this solution: reduce (1) overuse of health services, (2) preventable complications and (3) waste within healthcare processes. These challenges know no borders.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to develop a method to assess the potential effects of air pollution mitigation on healthcare costs and to apply this method to assess the potential savings related to a reduction in fine particle matter in Denmark. METHODS The effects of air pollution on health were used to identify "exposed" individuals (i.e., cases). Coronary heart disease, stroke, chron...

Literature and original analysis of healthcare costs have shown that a small proportion of patients consume the majority of healthcare resources. A proactive approach is to target interventions towards those patients who are at risk of becoming high-cost users (HCUs). This approach requires identifying high-risk patients accurately before substantial avoidable costs have been incurred and healt...

Reliable estimates of the costs of tobacco use are valuable to policy-makers, particularly in planning health service provision and other items of public expenditure. However, such estimates are difficult to obtain because the methods used by different researchers vary and, in some respects, are controversial. Four types of cost analyses are compared here and the implications of different metho...

OBJECTIVE Our objective was to compare all-cause and stroke- and bleed-specific healthcare costs among patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF) treated with dabigatran or warfarin. METHODS Administrative claims data from the MarketScan® Databases for 2009-2014 were used. Patients with NVAF newly treated with dabigatran were matched 1:1 to those treated with warfarin. All-cause an...