In 2013 and 2014, the Netherlands experienced a measles outbreak in orthodox Protestant communities with low measles-mumps-rubella vaccination coverage. Assessing total outbreak costs is needed for public health outbreak preparedness and control. Total costs of this outbreak were an estimated $4.7 million.

BACKGROUND As farmers do not often keep a record of the expenditures for rearing, an economic tool that provides insight into the cost of rearing is useful. In the Netherlands, an economic tool (Jonkos) has been developed that can be used by farmers to obtain insight into the cost of rearing on their farm. The first objective of this study is to calculate the total cost of rearing young stock i...

Persistence of species in fragmented landscapes depends on dispersal among suitable breeding sites, and dispersal is often influenced by the "matrix" habitats that lie between breeding sites. However, measuring effects of different matrix habitats on movement and incorporating those differences into spatially explicit models to predict dispersal is costly in terms of time and financial resource...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether participation in a worksite wellness program differs by age and sex and is associated with frequency and average cost of medical claims. METHODS Healthcare cost data were available for school district employees during the academic years ending in 2009 through 2014. The wellness program was available in the later 3 years. The frequency and the average cost of medi...

Interest in genomic testing for the selection of cancer therapy is growing. However, the cost of genomic testing has not been well studied. We sought to determine the price of identifying mutations and copy number alterations (CNAs) in theoretically actionable genes across multiple tumor types. We reviewed data from The Cancer Genome Atlas to determine the frequency of alterations in nine tumor...

Imagine the following scenario: You are head of the medical education unit at a large teaching hospital. You have had a contract with an external organisation that provides assessment services, but that contract has just run out and you now need to decide whether to renew or go with an alternative provider. You consider the costs of switching provider but also have less tangible concerns about ...

Proponents of health savings accounts (HSAs) contend that they will reduce medical expenditures. In practice, however, the effect of HSAs, and the high-deductible health plans that must accompany them, will depend on the actual provisions of those plans and of the plans they replace. We show that typical plans in the market today already contain substantial cost sharing. We find that many HSA/h...