The economic burden of periprosthetic infections is enormous, but the number of economic studies dealing with this issue is very scarce. This review tries to know the economic literature existing, assess the value of current data, and recognize the less costly and more effective procedures for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of periprosthetic infections. Forty five studies meeting the inclu...

de Kok et al. (1) recently reported the cost-effectiveness of human papillomavirus vaccination in the netherlands and argued that human papillomavirus vaccination is not a cost-effective preventive measure in the netherlands. They calculated a discounted (annual rate 3%) incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (IcER) of €53 500 per qualityadjusted life-year (Qaly), which is clearly higher than the...

OBJECTIVE To perform a cost-utility analysis on the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with methylphenidate immediate-release (MPH-IR) in children and adolescents from Brazil. METHOD A Markov model was constructed to compare MPH-IR vs. no treatment. A 24-week naturalistic study was conducted to collect transition probabilities and utility data. Effectiveness was expr...

OBJECTIVE To assess the cost-effectiveness of two alternate forms of Family Connections (FC), a child neglect prevention program, in relation to changes in risk and protective factors and improvements in child safety and behavioral outcomes. METHODS In the original FC study, a sample of 154 families (473 children) in a poor, urban neighborhood, who met risk criteria for child neglect, were ra...

BACKGROUND Reablement is a promising new rehabilitation model, which is being implemented in some Western countries to meet current and future needs for home-based services. There is a need for further investigation of the effects of reablement among community-dwelling adults in terms of clinical and economic outcomes. This study will investigate the effectiveness of reablement in home-dwelling...

BACKGROUND A growing body of research has identified family interventions to be effective in treating young people's substance use problems. However, despite this evidence, take-up of family-based approaches in the UK has been low. Key factors for this appear to include the resource-intensive nature of most family interventions which challenges implementation and delivery in many service settin...

The identification of the cost function, the optimization of which generates the optimal behavior of a dynamic system, is one of the most challenging problems in the areas of sensorimotor control, machine learning and control theory. The problem could be state as follows: given the dynamics of a system and by observing its behavior we ask what is the cost function that if it was optimized it wo...

OBJECTIVE To develop a framework for understanding factors affecting the use of patient survey data in quality improvement. DESIGN Qualitative interviews with senior health professionals and managers and a review of the literature. SETTING A quality improvement collaborative in Minnesota, USA involving teams from eight medical groups, focusing on how to use patient survey data to improve pa...

BACKGROUND Supervised injection facilities (SIFs) are venues where people who inject drugs (PWID) have access to a clean and medically supervised environment in which they can safely inject their own illicit drugs. There is currently only one legal SIF in North America: Insite in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The responses and feedback generated by the evaluations of Insite in Vancouver ...

BACKGROUND Delivering an intervention to a group of patients to improve health outcomes is increasingly popular in public health and primary care, yet "group" is an umbrella term which encompasses a complex range of aims, theories, implementation processes and evaluation methods. We propose a framework for the design and process evaluation of health improvement interventions occurring in a grou...