Background: The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) emphasises that cost-effectiveness is not the only consideration in health technology appraisal and is increasingly explicit about other factors considered relevant. Observing NICE decisions and the evidence considered in...

Accounting for variation in the quality of care is a major challenge for the assessment of hospital cost performance. Because data on patients’ health improvement are generally not available, existing studies have resorted to inherently incomplete outcome measures such as mortality or...

A study by health economists at the University of York has, for the first time, produced an estimate of the impact on other NHS patients of new and more costly drugs and other treatments. This research suggests a refinement of the way the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence...

The English Department of Health has introduced routine collection of patient-reported health outcome data for selected surgical procedures (hip and knee replacement, hernia repair, varicose vein surgery) to facilitate patient choice and increase provider accountability. The EQ-5D has been...