Drug acquisition costs are only a proportion of the total costs associated with drug therapy. The relevance of these costs are often not appreciated. However, they impact on the Intensive Care Unit via resources and quality of care. Increased indirect care by medical and nursing staff has the potential to adversely affect patient outcome. Redirecting staff to their primary role and reducing ind...

In 2008, a World Health Organization multi-national clinical trial found screening and brief intervention (SBI) to be effective in reducing illicit drug use and many have called for its widespread dissemination. To gain policy support for widespread dissemination, however, a strong business case must be made to policymakers. In particular, policymaker concerns over implementation costs can act ...

OBJECTIVES We developed a micro-costing methodology to estimate the real resource costs consumed by delivery of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Cooperative Agreement Standard Intervention (SI) for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention, plus two enhanced modules, in a three-arm randomized controlled trial (RCT) among drug-using women. To our knowledge, this is the first micro...

OBJECTIVES The assignment of prices or costs to pharmaceuticals can be crucial to results and conclusions that are derived from pharmacoeconomic cost effectiveness analyses (CEAs). Although numerous pharmacoeconomic practice guidelines are available in the literature and have been promulgated in many countries, these guidelines are either vague or silent about how drug costs should be establish...

OBJECTIVES To calculate total costs over 6 years after diagnosis of early rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHOD In the longitudinal prospective multicentre TIRA study, 239 patients from seven units, diagnosed in 1996-98, reported regularly on health-care utilization and the number of days lost from work. Costs were obtained from official databases and calculated using unit costs (Swedish kronor, ...

In 1998 the medical costs of obesity were estimated to be as high as $78.5 billion, with roughly half financed by Medicare and Medicaid. This analysis presents updated estimates of the costs of obesity for the United States across payers (Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers), in separate categories for inpatient, non-inpatient, and prescription drug spending. We found that the increased pr...