Economic evaluation and limitations measuring the effectiveness of preventive health care interventions

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School of Business | Bachelor's thesis

Date

2019

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Mcode

Degree programme

Taloustiede

Language

en

Pages

28

Series

Abstract

The world is being mauled by chronic illnesses and the ever-rising costs of healthcare. Researchers in the field of healthcare agree that chronic illnesses are mostly by their nature preventable. Despite all,preventive healthcare seems to not attract the interest amongst decision makers and aren’t provided to the public nearly as much as curative healthcare services are. This literature review focuses on providing a wireframe like image of how economic evaluation is being conducted in the field of healthcare. This is done by introducing the most common tools thoroughly: COI, PCA, CEA, CUA and CBA, how these tools differ compared with one another and the limitations and assumptions that these tools and the current research methods face. By introducing these tools, and their limitations in capturing essential value and effectiveness of prevention, such as, preventions role in decreasing other co-morbidities and the effect of potential spillover effects, we look to encourage the further development of the existing process of conducting economic evaluation in the field of healthcare. Firstly, we assume that by all stakeholders in the field adopting a universal language of measuring cost-efficiency of prevention, and breaking a potential barrier of communication would result in wider adaption of prevention. Secondly by taking into consideration and by implementing the limitations of the tools currently used to develop future models, prevention effectiveness calculations in terms of their increased cost-efficiency could be presented in a better light to the deciding policymakers and would gain more interest amongst these stakeholders, which would ideally result in the increased provision of preventive healthcare services to the public in the future.

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Thesis advisor

Murto, Pauli
Mustonen, Mikko

Keywords

preventive healthcare, economic evaluation, CUA, CBA, CEA

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