How Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Helps in Health Care Decision-Making

cost benefit analysis example in healthcare

If an individual chooses to purchase a particular good or service, he or she presumably values that good or service at least as much as the other things he or she could have used that money to buy. More generally, if a country or other funder chooses to spend more on one initiative, it will have fewer resources available to devote to other purposes – including other initiatives that address the same or similar problems. Production-based approaches for valuing health gains have been criticised for not being consistent with the theoretical foundations of CBA in welfare economics, as they focus on changes in productivity rather than measuring overall welfare. Similarly, QALY-based approaches do not fit naturally within the conceptual framework of welfare economics, because they measure changes in health rather than overall welfare. The approach that most directly reflects the principles of welfare economics is to estimate the consumption that affected individuals are willing to trade-off to avoid morbidity or mortality [27, 58, 59]. The very existence of a budget constraint can be questioned because it predetermines that something will be funded, even without knowing if any intervention for a specific purpose like dementia was socially worthwhile.

cost benefit analysis example in healthcare

For the current study, we applied eight different approaches to monetise benefits of HPV vaccination and compared the results. There is increasing interest in estimating the broader benefits of public health interventions beyond those captured in traditional cost-utility analyses. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in principle offers a way to capture such benefits, but a wide variety of methods have been used to monetise benefits in CBAs.

How to carry out a cost benefit analysis

We start the analysis by viewing CEA as a method of economic evaluation in its classical form, which involves covering mutually exclusive interventions with, and without, a budget constraint. This leads the analysis to CBA proper which, unlike CEA, can be applied to any type of healthcare intervention to assess whether it is socially worthwhile. In the discussion section, some what is a cost benefit analysis of the background wider issues concerning CEA and dementia interventions are presented. But, when the perspective is social, meaning everyone in society, whether they be family members, third parties or taxpayers is involved, and a budget has not been allocated, a CEA is completely insufficient for deciding priorities as to which interventions, if any, should be funded.

Subtracting the cost of $7500 involved with facilitating the prosecution of the abusers, the net-benefits of reducing the dementia symptoms were calculated to be $42,500 (See [2], chapter 8). It is clear from this application of the CEA method to the new dementia interventions that the decision-maker who specified how large the budget for the institution was going https://www.bookstime.com/ to be, was effectively determining which interventions were worthwhile for that institution and therefore were going to be carried out. The fundamental weakness of CEA is that this budget decision would be made in advance of knowing what interventions were available, and what the costs and effects are likely to be of the interventions that were available.

CEA Example (Intervention is More Effective and Less Costly):

CEA looks specifically at an intervention and tells how much health benefit we can get for the money. CEA can be useful in comparing the health and cost impacts of different interventions affecting the same health outcome. It can also be useful for understanding how much an intervention may cost (per unit of health gained) compared to an alternative intervention. For example, a decision maker might find it useful to know if an intervention is cost saving, and if not how much more would it cost to implement it compared to a less effective intervention.

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