Background: Published guidelines on the conduct of economic evaluations provide little guidance regarding the use and potential bias of the different costing methods. <P>Objectives: Using microcosting and two gross-costing methods, we (1) compared the cost estimates within and across subjects, and...</p>

The open-ended and payment scale approaches to eliciting willingness to pay (WTP) valuations are compared. Use of the payment scale led to a higher response rate, a higher rate of completion of the WTP question, higher mean and median WTP values, a stronger association between WTP and ability to...

There are strong theoretical arguments for including future costs for related and unrelated medical care and non-medical expenditures within economic evaluations. Nevertheless, there is limited data on how inclusion of such costs affects the cost effectiveness of medical interventions in...

This paper examines the form of performance-based contract which is relatively new to healthcare systems. Economic theories on contracting are reviewed to provide theoretical support for potential impacts of performance-based contracting (PBC) on improving efficiency of the healthcare system....

There has been much recent debate in the health economics literature as to the (near) equivalence of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that whether such a (near) equivalence exists depends on whether one defines economic...

Background: There is evidence that the earlier a patient reaches hospital and receives thrombolysis, the better the outcome. The GREAT (Grampian Region Early Anistreplase Trial) directly addressed the issue of early thrombolysis by evaluating, in a randomised controlled trial, the efficacy of...

While there are many published economic evaluations of health care, few allow the reader to understand the practice of costing health care programmes. The aim of this document is to fill this gap. In the document, the principles of how to cost health care for economic evaluation are outlined....