Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The WSJ reports: President Donald Trump named Tomas Philipson, an economist at the University of Chicago who has specialized in health-care policy, to the three-member Council of Economic Advisers on Monday. More information is in this White House press release. Dr. Philipson is one of the founders of my current employer, Precision Health Economics. I…
Cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) aims to examine whether the benefits of a treatment outweigh the costs. However, whenever one is conducting a CEA a key question is benefits to whom and costs to whom. For instance, a modestly efficacious drug may be cost effective from the patient’s perspective if all or most costs are covered by insurance.…
What is cost effectiveness analysis or CEA? One definition is that CEAs–at least in the field of health care–measure the difference or ratio between cost of care and the benefits of care for a given intervention compared to an alternative treatment strategy. The intervention could be a new surgical procedure, a drug, a behavior modification program or any other…
How do you implement a cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) for the implementation of evidence-based practices (EBP)? This is the topic Fortney et al. (2014) address. They review four types of CEAs. Trial based CEA. Relies on traditional randomized controlled trials (RCT). Because RCTs are expensive, they are typically run on a small sample of the…