Time for a common standard for cost-effectiveness in Europe?

Excerpt

It is now 30 years since the first steps were taken to introduce economic evaluation as an instrument in health policy in Europe [1, 2, 3]. The pioneers, like Alan Williams at York University, had to balance two different goals, the development of an appropriate methodology based on principles of economic theory and obtaining acceptance for economics in the evaluation of health care technologies. The development of cost-effectiveness analysis rather than cost-benefit analysis was one way of obtaining acceptance for the role of the health economist in health technology assessment (for some key contributions, see [4, 5]). However, it took a long time to develop a measure of effectiveness, quality-adjusted life years (QALY), which made it possible to compare different health improvement programs [6]. …