Opportunity costs and uncertainty in the economic evaluation of health care interventions

P Sendi; A Gafni; S Birch

doi:10.1002/hec.641

Opportunity costs and uncertainty in the economic evaluation of health care interventions

Health Econ. 2002 Jan;11(1):23-31. doi: 10.1002/hec.641.

Authors

P Sendi¹, A Gafni, S Birch

Affiliation

¹ Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, 1200 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8N 3Z5.

PMID: 11788979
DOI: 10.1002/hec.641

Abstract

Considerable methodological research has been conducted on handling uncertainty in cost-effectiveness analysis. The current literature suggests the concepts of net health benefits and cost-effectiveness acceptability curves to circumvent the technical shortcomings of cost-effectiveness ratio statistics. However, these approaches do not provide a solution for the inherent problem that the threshold cost-effectiveness ratio itself is unknown. The authors suggest analysing uncertainty in cost-effectiveness analysis by directly addressing the concept of opportunity costs using the decision rule described by Birch and Gafni (1992) and introduce a new graphical framework (the "decision making plane") for communicating with policy makers.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Budgets
Cost of Illness
Cost-Benefit Analysis / methods
Cost-Benefit Analysis / statistics & numerical data*
Decision Making, Organizational*
HIV Infections / economics
HIV Infections / therapy
Health Care Costs
Health Care Rationing / economics*
Health Care Rationing / methods
Humans
Models, Econometric
Policy Making
Program Evaluation / economics
Program Evaluation / methods