ABSTRACT
The current trend in healthcare is to focus on controlling costs in an attempt to minimize the gap between individual expectations for access to medical care and the availability of societal resources to fund such care. Those in charge of financing, reimbursing, and providing healthcare aim at striking a balance between the objectives of lowering total costs of care and optimizing the health of their patients. These two objectives, however, are often in conflict with each other. Decision makers have to make choices between adoption of cost-increasing technologies that have the potential to improve health and spending in other areas that compete for the same limited resources. These decisions are complicated due to healthcare budget constraints, limited government budgets, rising prices, and an aging population. Thus, decision makers would prefer to base their choices on rational and consistent methods of evaluation designed to meet the dual objective of maximizing health given the limited budget. A common and accepted approach to comparing the relative value of healthcare interventions in creating better health outcomes is cost-effectiveness analysis.
The use of this decision making process requires an understanding of the social, functional, and economic burden of illness and the costs and outcomes associated with different interventions.
