In an era of increasingly constrained health care budgets, with health authorities looking for places to decrease the health funds spending, and manage care organizations deciding where to limit health care expenditures, cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is likely to play an important role in health care decision making. In theory, CEA shows how to spend available money in ways that maximize the amount of health care benefit per money expended. Thus, it is imperative that CEA do a good job of capturing how society wants to spend scarce health care resources. CEA is one of the most powerful tools to guide health care allocation decisions.
Two features characterize economic analysis, regardless of the activities to which it is applied. First, it deals with both the inputs and outputs, sometimes called costs and consequences of activities. Second, economic analysis concerns itself with choices. These two characteristics of economic analysis lead us to define economic evaluation as the comparative analysis of alternative courses of action in terms of both their costs and consequences. Therefore, the basic tasks of any economic evaluation are to identify, measure, value, and compare the costs and consequences of the alternatives being considered.
In a CEA, the incremental cost and incremental effectiveness of an intervention are calculated relative to a comparator and a ratio is generally the net direct resource consumption.
The application of health economics in the field of health care reflect a universal desire to obtain maximum value for money by ensuring not just the clinical effectiveness, but also the cost-effectiveness of health care provision. Scarcity of resources requires decision makers to choose which technology to reimburse. The basis for their choice is the relative value that they place on each technology. The structure of these relative values is the basis for their approach for prioritization.
Services:
* Perform cost-effectiveness analysis according to client aim
* Study design consolation according to client aim
Pharmacoeconomic studies may become important for pricing negotiations.
1. Economic evaluation:
1. Economic evaluation: in this study we will use the CEA as main method for economic evaluation, since CEA allow us to compare the financial costs of therapies whose outcomes can be measured purely in terms of health effect, for example, years of life gained.
2. Sensitivity analysis: CEA is far from being a precise science, and the results should be subjected to sensitivity analysis. The relatively uncertain data on the effects of an intervention, the difficulty of arriving at accurate estimates of the cost of healthcare and the fact that CERs are point estimates, which by definition have some uncertainty around them, all mean that CERs require some indication of the confidence that can be placed in them. Sensitivity analysis tests all the assumptions used in the model and enables the impact of best-case and worse-case scenarios on the baseline findings to be investigated.