Programme costs in the economic evaluation of health interventions 英文参考文献.docVIP

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation BioMedCentral Methodology Open Access Programme costs in the economic evaluation of health interventions Benjamin Johns*, Rob Baltussen and Raymond Hutubessy Address: Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy (GPE/EQC), World Health Organization, CH-1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland Email: Benjamin Johns* - johnsb@; Rob Baltussen - baltussenr@; Raymond Hutubessy - hutubessyr@ * Corresponding author Published: 26 February 2003 Received: 24 February 2003 Accepted: 26 February 2003 Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation 2003, 1:1 This article is available from: /content/1/1/1 ? 2003 Johns et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the articles original URL. Abstract Estimating the costs of health interventions is important to policy-makers for a number of reasons including the fact that the results can be used as a component in the assessment and improvement of their health system performance. Costs can, for example, be used to assess if scarce resources are being used efficiently or whether there is scope to reallocate them in a way that would lead to improvements in population health. As part of its WHO-CHOICE project, WHO has been developing a database on the overall costs of health interventions in different parts of the world as an input to discussions about priority setting. Programme costs, defined as costs incurred at the administrative levels outside the point of delivery of health care to beneficiaries, may comprise an important component of total costs. Cost- effectiveness analysis has sometimes omitted them if the main focus has been on personal curative interventions or on the costs of making small changes within the existing administrative set-up. However, this is not appropriate for non-pers