Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #118967

M. Ashraf Chaudhary, Department of International Health, The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe St. Rm W5506, Baltimore, MD 21205, )410) 502-0741, mchaudha@jhsph.edu and Mohamed Shoukri, Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Scientific Computing, King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, PO Box 3354 MBC 03, Riyadh, 11211, Saudi Arabia.

The statistic of interest in most health economic evaluations is the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER). Since ICER is generally positively skewed and far from normal and the variance of the ratio estimator is intractable, the health economics literature has suggested a number of alternative approaches to estimating confidence intervals for cost-effectiveness ratios. These approaches are been restricted to individual level data. The trials randomizing clusters have become particularly wide-spread in the evaluation of non-therapeutic outreach interventions, including lifestyle modification, educational programs and innovations in the provision of health care. The methods for the analysis of cluster randomized data have also been dealt with extensively, however the extension of cost effectiveness analysis methods to cluster randomized trials still remains to be a challenge (Klar and Donner, 2000). This paper aims to fill this gap in the health economics literature by extending the interval estimation methods for ICER for individual data to cluster randomized trials and make some empirical comparisons.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the session, the attendee of this session will be able to

• appreciate the importance cost-effectiness analysis of outreach interventions in community randomized trials and
• apply the proposed methodology to undertake the cost-effectiveness analysis.

Keywords: Health Service, Cost-Effectiveness

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation