Valuing Health Care

As expenditure on health care has increasingly become an area of public debate and concern public and private health care decision-makers have called for more rigorous use of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis to guide spending. Concerns have arisen however about the overall quality of such analyses. This book discusses and evaluates best-practice methods of conducting cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness studies of pharmaceuticals and other medical technologies. It encompasses a wide variety of topics ranging from measuring cost and effectiveness to discounting to the use of dynamic modelling of cost-effectiveness. The book also includes conceptual and practical aspects of cost-effectiveness analysis by researchers who have conducted applied research in these areas. Rarely does the book provide a singular solution to a measurement problem; rather the reader is directed to choices among alternative approaches and an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each.