Speaker
Torbjørn Wisløff, Senior Advisor, Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services.
Abstract
There are numerous medications, procedures and other interventions available in health care. The technological and medical developments are steadily increasing, and thus increase this number of interventions that can be offered to patients. No health care budget, however, are able to provide all available interventions. The effect of new interventions must be carefully examined and compared to the alternative interventions before a decision can be taken regarding whether new interventions can be introduced. It has become increasingly more common to also include analyses intended to determine whether the interventions costs are reasonable in relation to its effects. These analyses are often based on Monte Carlo simulation of simple decision trees or Markov models.
Recently, methods have been developed which also facilitates the calculation of whether it would be appropriate to conduct more research to provide more information about the decision regarding which intervention to provide in a health care system. Expansions of these analyses can give guidance on what kind of analyses to conduct.