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...

Annual direct costs for cancer care are projected to rise — from $104 billion in 20061 to over $173 billion in 2020 and beyond.2 This increase has been driven by a dramatic rise in both the cost of therapy3 and the extent of care.4 In the United States, the sales of anticancer drugs are now second only to those of drugs for heart disease, and 70% of these sales come from products introduced in ...

OBJECTIVE Effectiveness differences between outpatient pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) treatment regimens are uncertain, but significant differences in cost exist. GOAL To examine the influence of antibiotic costs on PID therapy cost-effectiveness. STUDY DESIGN The authors used a Markov decision model to estimate the cost-effectiveness of recommended antibiotic regimens for PID and perfor...

BACKGROUND Asthma education and action plans (AP) have been recognized as important components in the optimal management of asthma. Studies have differed on the importance of a peak flow-based self-management plans in reducing health care costs and use due to asthma exacerbation. OBJECTIVE To analyze the cost-effectiveness of peak flow-based action plans in reducing costs associated with ER v...

Economic evaluations are increasingly being conducted alongside clinical trials of health interventions, with resource consequences being estimated from stochastic data. It is, therefore, important that economic evaluation results, like the clinical results, reflect the underlying variance within the sample data. A statistical methodology, known as bootstrapping, has recently been put forward a...

OBJECTIVE To determine the cost effectiveness of two view mammography at incident screens. DESIGN Incremental cost effectiveness analyses recognising differences in current reading policy, based on effectiveness data from an observational study. SETTING Breast screening programmes in England and Wales. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Health service costs, cancers detected, incremental cost effectiv...

We describe the "evaluability bias": the tendency to weight the importance of an attribute in proportion to its ease of evaluation. We propose that the evaluability bias influences decision making in the context of charitable giving: people tend to have a strong preference for charities with low overhead ratios (lower administrative expenses) but not for charities with high cost-effectiveness (...

This paper proposed to take advantages of resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS) to measure the mechanical properties of human dentin specimen. The resonant spectroscopy of the dentin specimen was obtained between the frequency bands 155 and 575 kHz, and resonant frequencies were extracted by linear predictive filter and then by Levenberg-Marquardt method. By inverse problem approach, 13 experi...

OBJECTIVES A recent study showed that estimates of cost-effectiveness submitted to National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) by manufacturers had significantly lower incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) than those submitted by university-based Assessment Groups. This study extends that analysis. METHODS Data were abstracted from relevant NICE documentation for thir...

Estimation of the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) is difficult for several reasons: treatments that decrease both cost and effectiveness and treatments that increase both cost and effectiveness can yield identical values of the ICER; the ICER is a discontinuous function of the mean difference in effectiveness; and the standard estimate of the ICER is a ratio. To address these diffic...