In this article health economic implications of screening are analysed. First, requirements screening programmes should fulfil are derived, and methodical standards of health economic evaluation are outlined.Using the example of newborn hearing screening, it is then examined if empirical studies meet the methodical requirements of health economic evaluation. Some deficits are realised: Health e...

BACKGROUND In India 3.8 million people become blind due to cataracts every year. We assessed the cost-effectiveness of public-funded options for delivering cataract surgery in Mysore, Karnataka State, India. METHODS Three types of delivery of cataract surgery were studied: mobile government camps, walk-in services at a state medical college hospital, and patients transported in from satellite...

BACKGROUND The effectiveness of individual components (other than exercise) of multifactorial intervention packages aimed to reduce the incidence of falls in older people is uncertain. There have been no randomised trials of home modifications alone for the prevention of falls. OBJECTIVES To estimate the cost-effectiveness of just one component of a multifactorial approach to falls prevention...

BACKGROUND Effectiveness of Internet-based self-management in patients with asthma has been shown, but its cost-effectiveness is unknown. We conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis of Internet-based asthma self-management compared with usual care. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a randomized controlled trial, with 12 months follow-up. Patients were age...

Standard cost-effectiveness calculations as used by the UK National Institute of Clinical Excellence compare the net benefit of an intervention with the financial costs to the health service. Debates about public health interventions also focus on these factors. The subjective experience of the patient, including financial costs and also transient pain, distress, and indignity, is routinely ign...

BACKGROUND Rates of nonadherence to aromatase inhibitors (AIs) among Medicare beneficiaries with hormone receptor-positive early breast cancer are high. Out-of-pocket drug costs appear to be an important contributor to this and may be addressed by eliminating copayments and other forms of patient cost sharing. The authors estimated the incremental cost-effectiveness of providing Medicare benefi...

In runtime enforcement of security policies, the classic requirements on monitors in order to enforce a security policy are soundness and transparency. However, there are many monitors that successfully pass this specification but they differ in complexity of both their implementation and the output they produce. In order to distinguish and compare these monitors we propose to associate cost wi...

We consider the problem of assessing new and existing technologies for their cost-effectiveness in the case where data on both costs and effects are available from a clinical trial, and we address it by means of the cost-effectiveness acceptability curve. The main difficulty in these analyses is that cost data usually exhibit highly skew and heavy-tailed distributions, so that it can be extreme...