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 accepta-bility curves to circumvent the technical shortcomings of cost-effectiveness ratio...

The inclusion of economic evaluations as part of clinical trials has led to concerns about the adequacy of trial sample size to support such analysis. The analytical tool of cost-effectiveness analysis is the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER), which is compared with a threshold value...

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The cost-effectiveness of health-care interventions is often evaluated using quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) as a measure of outcome. QALYs are valid representations of welfare only under the questionable assumption of additive independence of utility of health states across time periods....

The potential of preventive health-care services to save costs is intensely debated. On the one hand, a longer life span increases the probability that new and costly diseases occur. On the other hand, a higher life expectancy postpones the expensive last year of life (LYOL), which becomes...

Today, one of the most pressing concerns of health-care policymakers in industrialized countries are deficits in the quality of health care. This paper presents a decision program that addresses the question in which disease areas and at what intensity to invest in quality improvement (QI) in...

High costs and deficits in the care of patients with chronic diseases have triggered numerous programs to improve the quality and efficiency of treatment of chronic diseases. Decision makers need to estimate the impact of a disease management program (DMP) on long-term costs and...

Public preferences are typically incorporated into cost-effectiveness analyses (CEA) on the basis of the average health state utilities of a sample of individuals drawn from the general public. The cost-effectiveness of a programme is then assessed on an 'all-or-nothing' basis: the programme is...

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