Measurement of costs for health economic evaluation

Abstract

The provision of guidelines on cost measurement for health economic evaluations enable research to be more standardized and hence more comparable, which offers clear benefits for policy formulation and health management. The guidelines herein focus on three aspects-the cost of health intervention/health care programs, the cost of illness/health risks, and use of costs in health economic evaluation. For each aspect, the main concepts and methods are outlined, and recommendations for the Thai context are presented. There is particular focus on how to calculate various costs according to different evaluation methods and perspectives, how to evaluate source of cost data, how to make value adjustments and how to present cost measurement findings.