conclusions this study aims to shed light on different methods of economic evaluations in order to provoke healthcare professionals and researchers to think about different ways in which economic evaluations might be of value to their practices. results it is likely that, to date, little attention has been paid to developing a better conceptual understanding of economic evaluations in decision-...

New medical technology is often cited as a contributing factor to increasing health care costs. In a 1990 report to the National Committee for Quality Health Care, 2 the forces driving health care spending were examined in detail. In a section reviewing the impact of new medical technology, the report cited an analysis of American Hospital Association data that concluded half the increase in re...

background and objectives: knowledge management (km) has emerged as a pathway towards competitive advantage in current complex industrial environment. the aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between km effectiveness and various organizational factors including social interactions (trust, communication and coordination), infrastructure factors (structure, information technol...

In discussions on the development of the institutional framework for decisions on the benefit package of social health insurance in Germany, the English National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) is considered as either a good or a bad example for reform. According to this study, the procedures and criteria applied by NICE for making health care coverage decisions are legitimate. Procedu...

BACKGROUND Integrated care pathways which cover multiple care settings are increasingly used as a tool to structure care, enhance coordination and improve transitions between care settings. However, little is known about their economic impact. The objective of this study is to determine the cost-effectiveness and cost-utility of an integrated care pathway designed for patients with complex heal...

Since 1998, the growth of health care spending has accelerated to levels not seen since the 1980s. This growth has renewed pressures on physicians to practice "cost-effective" care, since physicians' decisions account for the vast majority of all health care spending. But little is known about what physicians think about cost containment, and how they incorporate cost-effectiveness information ...

The concept of the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) provides a simple technical tool for summarising the impact a medical condition has on someone's life and the impact a health care intervention can have on that medical condition. In the former case, QALYs (and related concepts, such as disability-adjusted life years, DALYs) have been useful in producing summary statistics on the burden of di...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is one of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's significant initiatives that aims to improve treatment outcomes and lower health care costs. This article takes CER a step further and suggests a novel clinical application for it. The article proposes the development of a national framework to enable physicians to rapidly perform, through a comp...

Owing to an increasing focus on the rising cost of medical care in the United States, bending the cost curve has become the central tenet of healthcare reform. The exact definition of this phrase, however, remains elusive. In order to affect change in the cost and quality of healthcare, the importance of comparative effectiveness research must be recognized.