Extended Cost-Effectiveness Analysis for Health Policy Assessment: A Tutorial

Health policy instruments such as the public financing of health technologies (e.g., new drugs, vaccines) entail consequences in multiple domains. Fundamentally, public health policies aim at increasing the uptake of effective and efficient interventions and at subsequently leading to better health benefits (e.g., premature mortality and morbidity averted). In addition, public health policies can provide non-health benefits in addition to the sole well-being of populations and beyond the health sector. For instance, public policies such as social and health insurance programs can prevent illness-related impoverishment and procure financial risk protection. Furthermore, public policies can improve the distribution of health in the population and promote the equalization of health among individuals. Extended cost-effectiveness analysis was developed to address health policy assessment, specifically to evaluate the health and financial consequences of public policies in four domains: (1) the health gains; (2) the financial risk protection benefits; (3) the total costs to the policy makers; and (4) the distributional benefits. Here, we present a tutorial that describes both the intent of extended cost-effectiveness analysis and its keys to allow easy implementation for health policy assessment.