Economic evaluation and priority setting: an overview
This chapter provides an overview of the methodologies that come under the umbrella term of economic evaluation in healthcare. Economic evaluations seek to identify, measure, value, and compare alternative programmes. A taxonomy is developed to distinguish economic evaluation techniques depending on whether benefits have been measured in money terms or not, and whether benefits are based on preferences or not. When benefits are measured in money terms, it is referred to as a cost–benefit analysis (CBA). If benefits are measured in health terms, some sort of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is being used. An important class of CEA is what has come to be labelled ‘cost-utility-analysis’ (CUA). The chapter explains the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) and illustrates the cost-effectiveness plane. Finally, the idea of discounting health is discussed.