Valuing health care : costs, benefits, and effectiveness of pharmaceuticals and other medical technologies / edited by Frank A. Sloan.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Introduction / Frank A. Sloan -- 2. Evidence of effectiveness: evaluating its quality / Allan S. Detsky -- 3. Utility assessment for estimating quality-adjusted life years / Robert M. Kaplan -- 4. Measuring costs / David Dranove -- 5. From cost-effectiveness ratios to resource allocation: where to draw the line? / Milton C. Weinstein -- 6. Valuing health care benefits in money terms / Mark V. Pauly -- 7. Discounting health effects for medical decisions / W. Kip Viscusi -- 8. Statistical issues in cost-effectiveness analyses / John Mullahy and Willard Manning -- 9. Decision trees and Markov models in cost-effectiveness research / Emmett Keeler -- 10. The use of cost-effectiveness/cost-benefit analysis in actual decision making: current status and prospects / Frank A. Sloan and Christopher J. Conover.

As expenditure on health care has increasingly become an area of public debate and concern, public and private health care decision-makers have called for more rigorous use of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis to guide spending. Concerns have arisen, however, about the overall quality of such analyses. This book discusses and evaluates best-practice methods of conducting cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness studies of pharmaceuticals and other medical technologies. It encompasses a wide variety of topics, ranging from measuring cost and effectiveness to discounting to the use of dynamic modelling of cost-effectiveness. The book also includes conceptual and practical aspects of cost-effectiveness analysis by researchers who have conducted applied research in these areas. Rarely does the book provide a singular solution to a measurement problem; rather, the reader is directed to choices among alternative approaches and an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each.