Biases in cost measurement for economic evaluation studies in health care

Philip Jacobs and Jean‐François Baladi

Health Economics, 1996, vol. 5, issue 6, 525-529

Abstract: This paper addresses the issue of biases in cost measures which are used in economic evaluation studies. The basic measure of hospital costs which is used by most investigators is unit cost. Focusing on this measure, a set of criteria which the basic measures must fulfil in order to approximate the marginal cost (MC) of a service for the relevant product, in the representative site, was identified. Then four distinct biases—a scale bias, a case mix bias, a methods bias and a site selection bias—each of which reflects the divergence of the unit cost measure from the desired MC measure, were identified. Measures are proposed for several of these biases and it is suggested how they can be corrected.

Date: 1996
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1050(199611)5:63.0.CO;2-E

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:5:y:1996:i:6:p:525-529

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().