OBJECTIVE The present study compares the cost-effectiveness of targeted household treatment and mass treatment of children in the most westerly part of Nepal. METHODS Effectiveness was measured as the percentage point change in the prevalence of trachoma. Resource measures included personnel time required for treatment, transportation, the time that study subjects had to wait to receive treat...

BACKGROUND A major problem in cost-effectiveness studies is where to draw the line between interventions which are cost-effective and those who are not. Lacking a notion about the value of a QALY, all ultimate values to the cost-effectiveness ratio are essentially arbitrary. METHODS This paper presents a simple empirical model to estimate the compensating income variation of diseases and heal...

Health economic decision models often involve a wide-ranging and complicated synthesis of evidence from a number of sources, making design and implementation of such models resource-heavy. When new data become available and reassessment of treatment recommendations is warranted, it may be more efficient to perform a Bayesian update of an existing model than to construct a new model. If the exis...

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is potentially an important aid to public health decision-making but, with some notable exceptions, its use and impact at the level of individual countries is limited. A number of potential reasons may account for this, among them technical shortcomings associated with the generation of current economic evidence, political expediency, social preferences and sys...

The Bayesian approach to statistics has been growing rapidly in popularity as an alternative to the frequentist approach in the appraisal of healthcare technologies in clinical trials. Bayesian methods have significant advantages over classical frequentist statistical methods and the presentation of evidence to decision makers. A fundamental feature of a Bayesian analysis is the use of prior in...

In New South Wales, Australia, a cost-effectiveness evaluation was conducted of an adult drug court (ADC) program as an alternative to jail for criminal offenders addicted to illicit drugs. This article describes the program, the cost-effectiveness analysis, and the results. The results of this study reveal that, for the 23-month period of the evaluation, the ADC was as cost-effective as were c...

This analysis was carried out, first for Health Service properties in Northamptonshire, and then for schools and domestic properties. Comparison of the three programmes showed that the programme in schools was the most cost effective, but that a completed programme in domestic properties would be almost as effective. However, in the UK, only 10 % of those who discover raised radon levels have s...

The day is drawing near when each patient can be made into a SuperModel—not a fashion model, but a digital or virtual model (see companion paper Brown, in review). Such representation of a patient can also be termed a patient avatar (The Discipulus Project, 2013). Principles to help guide successful implementation of these SuperModels are addressed in this article, including efficiency and cost...