ABSTRACT
Increasingly, modern health care provision and utilization requires consideration and evaluation of the economic aspects. This is no more evident than in the care of stroke patients, where costs are not only high but also rising, owing to a combination of factors. These include the current high annual incidence of stroke and prevalence of disabled stroke survivors, the rising absolute number of incident cases of stroke and prevalent disabled survivors as the population ages, and the rapid development and application of new and expensive diagnostic technologies (e.g., magnetic resonance imaging) and treatments (e.g., tissue plasminogen activator, clopidogrel, carotid endarterectomy, and stenting) for stroke patients. These high and rising costs have prompted a search for greater efficiency in the delivery of stroke care. Not only do research grant funding bodies now encourage an economic evaluation of new health technologies and treatments (1), but in some countries there is now a need to actually demonstrate relative costeffectiveness of new health technologies and treatments. In Australia, economic evaluation is a requirement for public sector funding of new drugs (2), and in the American state of Oregon, economic evaluation has been used to define what services should be included in Medicare (3).
