In this week's PLoS Medicine, John Ioannidis and Alan Garber from Stanford University, USA, discuss how to use incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICER) and related metrics so they can be useful for decision-making at the individual level, whether used by clinicians or individual patients. The authors say that "Cost-effectiveness analysis offers a foundation for rational decision-making and can be very helpful in making health care more efficient and effective at the population level. Such analyses can often become more useful for clinicians and for individual patients as well, when they individualize the cost-utility information they present. Individual-tailored information can complement the traditional ICER."
Source: Public Library of Science