Computer-aided system for health economic evaluation

Background Health policy makers are usually stranded by the complicated infrastructure and intensive computation related to economic evaluation. Objectives It is therefore valuable to develop a computer-aided tool to help health personnel to perform economic evaluation with ease. Method The infrastructure for economic evaluation was first designed. Markov process with micro-simulation was applied to model the disease natural history or lifetime sequale to project the effectiveness by comparing all possible decisions. All the essential elements of economic evaluation together with sensitivity analysis are encoded in this computer-aided software written with SAS Screen Control Language in user-defined menu style. Illustration Screening versus no screening for colorectal cancer was used as an example. Conclusion The computer-aided model for economic evaluation was developed in this study. It is anticipated that the flexibility and user-defined menu style facilitate the wide application of economic evaluation to health care intervention program.