Reducing uncertainty in health-care resource allocation.

ABSTRACT: A key task for health policymakers is to optimise the outcome of health care interventions. The pricing of a new generation of cancer drugs, in combination with limited health care resources, has highlighted the need for improved methodology to estimate outcomes of different treatment options. Here we introduce new general methodology, which for the first time employs continuous hazard functions for analysis of survival data. Access to continuous hazard functions allows more precise estimations of survival outcomes for different treatment options. We illustrate the methodology by calculating outcomes for adjuvant treatment of gastrointestinal stromal tumours with imatinib mesylate, which selectively inhibits the activity of a cancer-causing enzyme and is a hallmark representative for the n

SUBMITTER: Simonsson T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2359979 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature