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24 - On the definition and measurement of the economic burden of cancer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2009

By
Mark C. Hornbrook Ph.D.
Edited by
Joseph Lipscomb ,
Carolyn C. Gotay  and
Claire Snyder
Mark C. Hornbrook Ph.D.
Affiliation:
Chief Scientist Center for Health Research Northwest/Hawai'i, Kaiser Permanente Northwest Region, Portland, OR
Joseph Lipscomb
Affiliation:
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland
Carolyn C. Gotay
Affiliation:
Cancer Research Center, Hawaii
Claire Snyder
Affiliation:
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland
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Summary

Introduction

Economic analysis should play an essential role in controlling cancer, including defining priorities for research, treatment, screening, and prevention because society's resources are limited.– Competing demands for resources can give rise to decisions with myriad unforeseeable effects on costs, outcomes, and benefit distribution. Patients, families, physicians, and other providers face difficult trade-offs among alternative cancer prevention, screening, treatment, and palliation regimens with differing costs, probabilities of successful outcomes, side effects during treatment, and levels of uncertainties associated with estimates of these parameters. Even seeking additional information to reduce uncertainty about regimen options is costly, and the information gained will be of little value if it is wrong or irrelevant.

The concept of economic burden of disease is central to considerations of how to achieve an optimal resource allocation to and within health care.– Diseases that place the highest economic burdens on society, for example, should receive greater priority in medical and health services research compared to other diseases. Moreover, cancer treatments and prevention services that provide greater reductions in cancer's overall economic burden should receive greater priority in making coverage decisions, developing clinical practice guidelines, and making clinical decisions. Models that forecast cancer's economic burden are needed to understand the relative ranking among the sources of burden; to identify potential disease management opportunities so that appropriate practice guidelines can be developed, tested, and implemented; and to decompose total burden imposed by all comorbidities into cancer-related and cancer-unrelated.

Type
Chapter
Information
Outcomes Assessment in Cancer
Measures, Methods and Applications
 , pp. 480 - 502
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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