There is a growing expectation from health care policymakers, such as US Public Health Service, National Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme in Australia, Ontario Drug Benefit Plan in Canada etc., to show evidence supporting the cost-effectiveness of new health care interventions (Willan and Briggs, 2006). Cost-effectiveness can be considered …show more content…
However, prolonging life is not the only intention of a health intervention. Prolonging healthy life is also of great importance. In order to address this issue, other measures have been proposed for the effectiveness, such as the Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) or Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). Both of these measures express health in time, i.e., they don't just count the additional years gained, but they also adjust for the possible health improvement. Furthermore, both of them are examples of Health-Adjusted Life Years (HALYs) and they assign the value of 1 in the case of perfect health. Their main difference is that DALYs measure health lost, while QALYs measure health gain. These measures give us the ability to compare interventions aimed at improving the quality of life, and not merely reducing mortality. At this point though, we need to clarify that nonhealth-related benefits (e.g. healthier workers tend to be more productive) are not taken into …show more content…
Moreover, prices can markedly vary between (or even within) countries and therefore can affect the cost estimates. Hence, information about the prices of the inputs into interventions in each country is necessary. Moreover, cost scope is adequate to affect the cost-effectiveness analysis, just like the health-benefit scope \textcolor{blue}{[THE SENTENCE IS NOT CLEAR]}. Some researchers choose to focus only on the direct costs of providing a service while some others choose to include further costs, such as the time patients spent in obtaining the service. However, it needs to be noted that ``the more costs are included, the higher the cost per unit of health gain and therefore the less the interventions appears as cost-effective" (Jamison et al.,2006, Chapter