The Imperative for Health Economics Assessment in Acute Kidney Injury

tailed approach to cost assessment and budgeting ensures the financial sustainability of any program over the long term. The evaluation of economic impacts in health care is part of a more comprehensive decision-making process, in which the contributions of different disciplines should be collectively integrated. This means that any effort should be made to find a common language and to use a standardized terminology among different yet complementary sciences. The task of bringing physicians, engineers, biologists, technicians, economists, and others together to understand one other and arrive at a consensus on issues concerning investments and choices of new health care services is not simple. This approach, however, represents a necessary step to undertake the common pathway towards improvement of health care services and ultimately health outcomes. Since comparative economic analysis provides better quantitative insight about strategies and techniques that are superior with respect to the available alternatives, HE should be considered a precious and powerful tool serving the scope of an efficient health care plan and effective patient care. Several techniques exist for HE evaluation and are briefly shown in table 1 . All techniques use similar approaches to estimate costs, but they differ in the methods employed to measure the health-related consequences of all alternatives and choices under investigation. The increasing cost of health and medical care services mandates the need for rigorous assessment of the full costs and benefits of all new therapies, programs, devices, diagnostics, and other interventions, in order to ensure that the limited resources are devoted to those endeavours that are expected to achieve that maximal outcome. Health economics (HE) is the discipline that employs economic concepts and tools to help decision makers determine how to best allocate scarce resources to improve health and health care [1] . Comprehensive economic evaluation does not merely tabulate the financial costs associated with a program but rather assesses all of the economic and clinical consequences, in terms of costs and benefits, of using new or established therapies or implementing a new health care program, as compared to available alternatives. Containing the cost of health care has become a core concern for all health care systems, especially in view of rising health care costs and shrinking health care budgets. From a conceptual standpoint, this is easy to comprehend if we think of resource allocation as a process that encompasses investments to the health care system within the whole economy as well as to different and competing activities within the health care system itself. Avoiding waste and inefficient use of resources allows the possibility of investing in other worthwhile projects that could not otherwise be undertaken. Moreover, a dePublished online: July 20, 2016