BACKGROUND QUALMAT project aimed at improving quality of maternal and newborn care in selected health care facilities in three African countries. An electronic clinical decision support system was implemented to support providers comply with established standards in antenatal and childbirth care. Given that health care resources are limited and interventions differ in their potential impact on ...

PURPOSE The optimal duration and intensity of warfarin therapy after a first idiopathic venous thromboembolic event are uncertain. We used decision analysis to evaluate clinical and economic outcomes of different anticoagulation strategies with warfarin. METHODS We built a Markov model to assess 6 strategies to treat 40- to 80-year-old men and women after their first idiopathic venous thrombo...

Cost and cost-effectiveness analysis has been more and more important to both policy makers and clinicians in assessing health care delivery. The incremental costeffectiveness ratio (ICER) is widely used inpractice to evaluate the relative health benefit of one treatment over another. Due to the short time span ofclinical trials, the cost estimated from observed data are often right censored. T...

BACKGROUND Previous cost-effectiveness studies using data from the literature showed that newborn screening for cystic fibrosis (NBSCF) is a good economic option with positive health effects and longer survival. METHODS We used primary data to compare cost-effectiveness of four screening strategies for NBSCF, i.e. immunoreactive trypsinogen-testing followed by pancreatitis-associated protein-...

OBJECTIVES Haemorrhoidal disease is a common condition causing considerable distress to individuals and significant cost to healthcare services. This paper explored the cost-effectiveness of stapled haemorrhoidopexy (SH) compared with the non-surgical intervention, rubber band ligation (RBL), for grade II symptomatic circumferential haemorrhoids. METHOD An economic evaluation alongside a rand...

OBJECTIVE This paper investigated the cost-effectiveness of a computer-assisted Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) in the identification of maternal complications in Ghana. METHODS A cost-effectiveness analysis was performed in a before- and after-intervention study. Analysis was conducted from the provider's perspective. The intervention area was the Kassena- Nankana district where comp...

One of the provisions of the health care reform legislation in 2010 was for funding pragmatic clinical trials or large observational studies for comparing the effectiveness of different approved medical treatments, involving broadly representative patient populations. After reviewing pragmatic clinical trials and the issues and challenges that have made them just a small fraction of comparative...

BACKGROUND Several studies have focused on stratifying patients according to their level of readmission risk, fueled in part by incentive programs in the U.S. that link readmission rates to the annual payment update by Medicare. Patient-specific predictions about readmission have not seen widespread use because of their limited accuracy and questions about the efficacy of using measures of risk...

The interest in Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) in the international community is growing. A panel titled "What Can Comparative Effectiveness Research Contribute to Integrative Health in International Perspective?" took place at the 3rd International Research Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health in Portland, Oregon, in 2012. The presentations at this panel highlighted different ...