Background: It is often assumed that the objective of health care is to maximise health using available resources. This is the principle underpinning NICE's use of cost effectiveness analysis based on incremental cost per QALY gained. Yet research on local NHS decision making shows that cost per...

The objective of this briefing is to summarise concisely the evidence on incentives that encourage providers of health care to follow guidance on best practice, particularly where that guidance requires the use of specific medicines or other health technologies. We define incentives broadly, to...

There has been long-standing interest in the use of incentives to encourage delivery of high-quality health care services at the lowest feasible cost. Although it is clear that health care professionals have intrinsic incentives to deliver high-quality care to patients, there are significant...

The UK Government is proposing a novel form of price regulation for branded medicines, which it has dubbed ‘value-based pricing’ (VBP). The specifics of how VBP will work are unclear. We provide an account of the possible means by which VBP of medicines might be operationalized, and a...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of the full set of possible means by which value based pricing (VBP) might be operationalised; to describe and categorise them by developing a taxonomy of approaches; to give an initial assessment of the challenges, pros and cons that each of the...

Objectives: The objectives of this research were to identify the cost-effectiveness of health care services at the margin in the Scottish NHS; consider the extent to which the thresholds observed in Scottish NHS decision making are consistent with the threshold being used to make judgements...