Róbert Babeľa, Tomáš Tesař
Cost-effectiveness analysis compares the costs and health effects of an intervention to assess whether it is worth doing from the economic perspective. Cost-effectiveness is only one of a number of criteria that should be employed in making purchasing decisions. Issues of equity, needs and priorities, for example, should also form part of the decision-making process. This type of analysis does not explicitly take a sectoral perspective in which the costs and effectiveness of all possible interventions are compared, in order to select the mix that maximizes health for a given set of resource constraints. The estimated cost-effectiveness of a single proposed new intervention is compared either with the cost-effectiveness of a set of existing interventions derived from the literature or with a fixed price cut-off point representing the assumed social willingness to pay for an additional unit of benefit.