11 March 2019 - Health care decision makers, including patients, clinicians, hospitals, private health systems, and public payers (eg, Medicare), are often challenged with choosing among several new or existing interventions or programs to commit their limited resources to. 

This choice is ideally based on a comparison of health benefits, harms, and costs associated with each alternative. How best to determine the optimal intervention is a challenging task because benefits, harms, and costs must be weighed for a given option and compared with alternatives.

One way to inform such decisions is to perform a cost-effectiveness analysis. A cost-effectiveness analysis is an analytic method for quantifying the relative benefits and costs among two or more alternative interventions in a consistent framework.

Read JAMA Guide to Statistics and Methods article