In a context of rapid technological advances in health care and increasing demand for expensive treatments, local formulary committees are key players in the management of scarce resources. However, little is known about the information and processes used when making decisions on the inclusion...

Patient choice is at the heart of health-care reform programmes in the UK and in many other countries. The success of patient choice initiatives is dependent on a well-functioning agency relationship in health care. We interviewed 197 patients from 13 general practices in the West Midlands, UK,...

Over recent years there has been renewed interest in cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in health care but the ‘hypothetical bias’ concern (i.e. the belief that WTP values overstate real preferences) is a remaining anxiety. This paper reports new empirical data comparing hypothetical and real...

Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) that use patient-specific data on costs and health outcomes from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) are popular, yet such CEAs are often criticized because they neglect to incorporate evidence external to the trial. Although evidence directly defined on cost...

Objectives There is interest in health economics around the values people ascribe when undertaking health state valuation techniques such as the PTO and TTO techniques. Part of the debate is around the fact that people may not have well articulated values, especially given the complex task of...

The topic of how cost-effectiveness information informs priority setting in healthcare remains important to both policy and practice. This commentary considers the study carried out by Eckard and colleagues in Sweden. In it we distinguish between the conditions at national and local levels and...