Statistical Methods for Healthcare Economic Evaluation

The increasing burden on the financial budgets of health care providers worldwide has emphasized the need to use health care resources as efficiently as possible. Health care economic evaluation has gained popularity in the last twenty years as a key tool to generate the information required by policy makers to achieve their goal. This chapter describes the statistical issues associated with the conduct of health care economic evaluation studies, considering both the analysis based on a single trial and the use of Bayesian comprehensive decision analytic models. Further issues as the role of probabilistic sensitivity analysis and Bayesian evidence synthesis are also presented. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.