Economic evaluation in health care

Economic evaluation of healthcare programmes helps us to assure the efficient use of healthcare resources. Costminimisation analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-utility analysis and cost-benefit analysis are the most commonly applied evaluation types. They differ in how they measure outcomes of healthcare interventions. Several guidelines for conducting economic evaluations exist. Furthermore, checklists have been developed for systematic critical appraisal of economic evaluations. Even though economic evaluations increase the transparency of resource allocation decisions and make decision criteria more explicit, they do not replace public discussions on the availability of overall resources for the public health care system.