Hospital costs and social cost: A case study of newborn hearing screening

The economic evaluation of health care programs can be carried out from two different perspectives: the hospital’s narrow perspective and the social perspective, which includes all costs. It is well known that, depending on the perspective, the economic evaluation may lead to discrepant recommendations. In this paper we present an example of this situation by reporting an economic evaluation of the screening procedures to detect congenital hearing impairment in newborns. We obtain that from the hospital’s perspective a targeted procedure, based on a previous high-risk criterion, is preferred, whereas from the social perspective a universal procedure is preferred.