The Bayesian approach to statistics has been growing rapidly in popularity as an alternative to the frequentist approach in the appraisal of healthcare technologies in clinical trials. Bayesian methods have significant advantages over classical frequentist statistical methods and the presentation of evidence to decision makers. A fundamental feature of a Bayesian analysis is the use of prior in...

In New South Wales, Australia, a cost-effectiveness evaluation was conducted of an adult drug court (ADC) program as an alternative to jail for criminal offenders addicted to illicit drugs. This article describes the program, the cost-effectiveness analysis, and the results. The results of this study reveal that, for the 23-month period of the evaluation, the ADC was as cost-effective as were c...

This analysis was carried out, first for Health Service properties in Northamptonshire, and then for schools and domestic properties. Comparison of the three programmes showed that the programme in schools was the most cost effective, but that a completed programme in domestic properties would be almost as effective. However, in the UK, only 10 % of those who discover raised radon levels have s...

The day is drawing near when each patient can be made into a SuperModel—not a fashion model, but a digital or virtual model (see companion paper Brown, in review). Such representation of a patient can also be termed a patient avatar (The Discipulus Project, 2013). Principles to help guide successful implementation of these SuperModels are addressed in this article, including efficiency and cost...

BACKGROUND Other than the UK, The Netherlands has no formal threshold for cost-per-QALY values defined yet. For example, a cutoff value at €20,000 per QALY is sometimes mentioned in various discussions, however it has no formal status at all. Yet, since 2005, all new innovative do have to go through a cost-effectiveness evaluation though, with the assessment being focused on the methodology rat...

BACKGROUND Although economic evaluation has been widely recognized as a key feature of both health services and educational research, for many years there has been a paucity of such studies relevant to services for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN), making the application of economic arguments to the development of services difficult. AIMS The study has two aims, n...

Cross-protection against non-HPV16/18 types and the emergence of broad spectrum vaccines protecting against multiple HPV types will influence the cost-effectiveness of future screening. To assess this influence we used an individual-based simulation model describing the relation between 14 HPV types and cervical disease, allowing the occurrence of multiple type infections. Screening scenarios f...

A series of complex logic gates were constructed based on graphene oxide and DNA-templated silver nanoclusters to perform both arithmetic and nonarithmetic functions. For the purpose of satisfying the requirements of progressive computational complexity and cost-effectiveness, a label-free and universal platform was developed by integration of various functions, including half adder, half subtr...

In a probabilistic sensitivity analysis (PSA) of a cost-effectiveness (CE) study, the unknown parameters are considered as random variables. A crucial question is what probabilistic distribution is suitable for synthesizing the available information (mainly data from clinical trials) about these parameters. In this context, the important role of Bayesian methodology has been recognized, where t...