ABSTRACT
Economic evaluation provides a framework within which a range of evidence can be assembled. Any analysis of current health sector services will identify things that are clearly high priorities, services that were previously useful but which should now be discontinued, and some that should never have been provided in the first place. Economic evaluation can help to distinguish these. It is often easier to get agreement to carry out economic evaluation of possible service developments than to revisit the priority of existing programmes. Economic evaluation can help to ensure that all relevant factors are counted once, and to avoid counting anything twice. It is surprisingly difficult to avoid double counting. There are several warning signs to look out for in assessing economic evaluation results. First, it is important to look at the perspective taken by the analyst. Advances in methods and computational feasibility have led to wider use of value of information analysis in economic evaluation.
