An introduction to economic evaluation for pediatric surgeons

In the last decade, the field of medicine has undergone irreversible changes in the relationship between the financing and delivery of health care. Because health care resources no longer can be treated as limitless, all providers are being forced to set priorities on services and are being held more accountable for quality of care. These changes have had a particular impact on surgical specialities. Because the discipline of economics is the study of the optimal allocation of scarce resources, it is not surprising that many of the methods of economic analysis now are being applied to outcomes research in surgery. Economic evaluation serves as the core methodology for the establishment of best practice guidelines through the growing field of evidenced-based medicine. The primary tools of economic evaluation include cost analysis, cost of illness analysis, cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and cost-utility analysis. This report provides an introduction of these methods to enable pediatric surgeons to understand and critically evaluate these investigations as applied in pediatric surgery.