Abstract
New innovations in surgery are common, and often touted as being cost-effective with the recommendation to adopt them into practice. Unfortunately, the term “cost-effective” is, more often than not, misused in the surgical literature. This misuse may have direct consequences if surgeons adopt new techniques or approaches that are not truly cost-effective. In this chapter, readers will be introduced to common terminology used in economic evaluations . This chapter, explains the four main forms of economic evaluations: Cost Analysis (CA) , Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) , Cost–Utility Analysis (CUA) , and Cost–Benefit Analysis (CBA) . It will also help the reader appraise and understand an article that purports to be an economic evaluation in surgery. Finally, hopefully, it will stimulate surgeon-investigators to perform economic evaluations parallel to Randomized Controlled Trials that compare a novel intervention to standard practice.
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Thoma, A., Xie, F., Santos, J., Goldsmith, C.H. (2019). Economic Evaluations in Surgery. In: Thoma, A., Sprague, S., Voineskos, S., Goldsmith, C. (eds) Evidence-Based Surgery. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05120-4_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05120-4_23
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