RECENT NEWS

Experts define state of the art in health cost costing

A recent meeting brought together experts from academia, government, and industry to discuss the state of the art in estimating health care costs. Meeting attendees heard 20 experts describe the state of the art in health cost identification.

Speakers described best practices on measurement of health care cost, available data, and the major conceptual, methodological, and statistical issues in measuring the economic burden of disease and the net-cost impact of interventions.

The meeting was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. These agencies, and the VA Health Economics Resource Center, are now working with meeting presenters to prepare a series of papers for publication as a journal supplement. The goal of the supplement will be to articulate the best approaches for health care cost analysis, in much the same way as the U.S. Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine did for cost-effectiveness analysis more than a decade ago.

The meeting, held December 2007, was titled: “Health Care Costs: Standardized Methods and Estimates for Research and Policy Applications.” The meeting, agenda and presentations are available electronically from: http://healthservices.cancer.gov/publications/workshops/hcc/agenda.html.