Priority setting of health interventions the need for multi-criteria decision analysis 英文参考文献.docVIP

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation BioMedCentral Methodology Open Access Priority setting of health interventions: the need for multi-criteria decision analysis Rob Baltussen*1,2 and Louis Niessen1,3 Address: 1Institute for Medical Technology Assessment (iMTA), ErasmusMC Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2Department of Public Health, University Medical Centre Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands and 3Department of Health Policy and Management, ErasmusMC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Email: Rob Baltussen* - r.baltussen@erasmusmc.nl; Louis Niessen - l.niessen@erasmusmc.nl * Corresponding author Published: 21 August 2006 Received: 01 March 2006 Accepted: 21 August 2006 Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation 2006, 4:14 doi:10.1186/1478-7547-4-14 This article is available from: /content/4/1/14 ? 2006 Baltussen and Niessen; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Priority setting of health interventions is often ad-hoc and resources are not used to an optimal extent. Underlying problem is that multiple criteria play a role and decisions are complex. Interventions may be chosen to maximize general population health, to reduce health inequalities of disadvantaged or vulnerable groups, ad/or to respond to life-threatening situations, all with respect to practical and budgetary constraints. This is the type of problem that policy makers are typically bad at solving rationally, unaided. They tend to use heuristic or intuitive approaches to simplify complexity, and in the process, important information is ignored. Next, policy makers may select interventions for only political motives. This indicates the need for rational and transparent approaches to priority s