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Opportunity costs and uncertainty in the economic evaluation of health care interventions
Author(s) -
Sendi P.,
Gafni A.,
Birch S.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
health economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.55
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1099-1050
pISSN - 1057-9230
DOI - 10.1002/hec.641
Subject(s) - cost–benefit analysis , psychological intervention , economic evaluation , opportunity cost , health care , incremental cost effectiveness ratio , cost effectiveness , quality adjusted life year , actuarial science , risk analysis (engineering) , economics , health economics , management science , environmental economics , computer science , cost effectiveness analysis , operations research , microeconomics , operations management , business , medicine , engineering , nursing , ecology , biology , economic growth
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 statistics. However, these approaches do not provide a solution for the inherent problem that the threshold cost‐effectiveness ratio itself is unknown. The authors suggest analysing uncertainty in cost‐effectiveness analysis by directly addressing the concept of opportunity costs using the decision rule described by Birch and Gafni (1992) and introduce a new graphical framework (the ‘decision making plane’) for communicating with policy makers. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.