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Economic evaluation of healthcare technologies using primary research
Department of Health Sciences, University of York; York, UK
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Clinicians and policy makers are often required to make difficult decisions regarding which health technologies they use. Increasingly, government bodies, such as the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK, produce national clinical guidelines and technology assessments to direct practice.1 These assessments often consider not only the benefits conferred by alternate treatment choices but also the costs.
It is vital that clinical practitioners have a clear understanding of why economic evaluations are needed, what the results of such evaluations mean, and how these findings can inform allocation decisions. We will begin by introducing key ideas and then illustrate these ideas with examples.
Central government or federally funded services must deliver health care within fixed and limited budgets (see box). Decisions made to spend money in one way will incur an opportunity cost in terms of investment in other health services that are foregone. For example, investment
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