Economic Evaluation of Integrated Care
Tsiachristas A., Rutten-Van Mölken MPMH.
The complexity of integrated care and the substantial resources needed to collect reliable data appears to have challenged health economists to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of integrated care to date. On the health services research side, health economists were not involved in many evaluation studies so far, which presumably resulted in low quality evidence on cost-effectiveness. Economic evaluations are frequently piggy back tailed in the effectiveness evaluation of integrated care but this needs to be changed because there is a clear need for better understanding and communication between health economists, researchers from other disciplines, clinicians, payers and decision-makers during the set-up of an evaluation study.