Abstract
Decision-making in health care is inevitably undertaken in a context of uncertainty concerning the effectiveness and costs of health care interventions and programmes. One method that has been suggested to represent this uncertainty is the cost-effectiveness acceptability curve. This technique, which directly addresses the decision-making problem, has advantages over confidence interval estimation for incremental cost-effectiveness ratios. However, despite these advantages, cost-effectiveness acceptability curves have yet to be widely adopted within the field of economic evaluation of health care technologies. In this paper we consider the relationship between cost-effectiveness acceptability curves and decision-making in health care, suggest the introduction of a new concept more relevant to decision-making, that of the cost-effectiveness frontier, and clarify the use of these techniques when considering decisions involving multiple interventions. We hope that as a result we can encourage the greater use of these techniques.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 779-787 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Health Economics |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2001 |
Keywords
- cost-effectiveness acceptability curves
- cost-effectiveness acceptability frontiers
- decision-making
- net benefits
- uncertainty
- HEALTH-CARE TECHNOLOGIES
- CLINICAL-TRIAL
- INFERENCE
- ALONGSIDE