Net Health Benefits: A New Framework for the Analysis of Uncertainty in Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

Aaron A. Stinnett and John Mullahy (jmullahy@wisc.edu)

No 227, NBER Technical Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the development of statistical methods for the analysis of uncertainty in cost-effectiveness analysis, with a focus on situations in which the analyst has patient-level data on the costs and health effects of alternative interventions. To date, discussions have focused almost exclusively on addressing the practical challenges involved in estimating confidence intervals for CE ratios. However, the general approach of using confidence intervals to convey information about uncertainty around CE ratio estimates suffers from theoretical limitations that render it inappropriate in many situations. We present an alternative framework for analyzing uncertainty in the economic evaluation of health interventions (termed the net health benefits' approach) that is more broadly applicable and that avoids some problems of prior methods. This approach offers several practical and theoretical advantages over the analysis of CE ratios, is straightforward to apply, and highlights some important principles in the theoretical underpinnings of CEA.

JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (145)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/t0227.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberte:0227

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/t0227

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Technical Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).