Health ecomomic evaluation is a relatively new decipline within clinical orthopaedics which combines methodology from epidemiology, biostatistics/econometrics, and economics. In specific, the type of evaluation which is being conducted at the Orthopaedic Research Laboratory is stochastic cost-effectiveness analysis, that is, analysis based on randomised clinical trials.
The health economic research being undertaken is, to a large extent, based upon the availability of high-quality register data from national registries such as the National Patient Register, the National Health Insurence Service Register, Register of Prescribed Medication and the Social Science Research Register. The Orthopeadic Research Laboratory is authorised by Statistics Denmark to conduct register based research using these registries.
One important rationale for health economic evaluation is a political desire for allocative effeciency i.e. that society maximizes its health gain from the health care budgets available. Our research aims at informing national politics i.e. we compare alternative clinical regimes using generic outcome measures to provide a cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) to allow for prioritization across diseases and interventions, not necessarily limited to orthopeadics.
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