The ‘how’ of cost-effectiveness analysis for care pathways is not straightforward

Abstract

Introduction: As health-care payers are faced with the need to allocate finite resources to maximize the health and wellbeing of the population, interest in the economic evaluation of health-care interventions has risen over the past decades. Although we have become aware of the growing importance of economic issues in medicine, economic evaluations in care pathways have remained up to now rather limited.Even if we agree with the author that there is an urgent need for economic evaluations in health service interventions, we fear that this paper contains methodological flaws which may mislead the reader of the journal, as well as potential users of economic evaluations.