Cost analysis for economic evaluation of health care services

Abstract

Health care costs have increased significantly over the past years, especially due to the accelerating development of new diagnosis and therapeutic technologies and therefore the increasingly life expectancy, which have reported the need to maximize the results through the application of allowable resources. In this context, the development of models for economic evaluation of health care services stands for the analysis of comparative alternatives, evaluated in both their costs and their benefits. In this article we examine the different models of economic evaluation of health care programs/services (cost-minimization, cost-effectiveness, cost-utility and cost-benefit), considering also the analysis of the various types of costs incurred and the ways to measure them, regardless the fact that indirect costs represent, in health care organizations, a considerable amount in the total cost of health services. We thereby present a study on the possible ways to apply the various models of economic evaluation, the advantages and disadvantages of those applications in a Portuguese hospital.