http://hwmaint.annals.org Annals of Internal Medicine RSS feed -- recent Academia and Clinic articles Annals of Internal Medicine 0003-4819 http://hwmaint.annals.org/icons/banner/title.gif http://hwmaint.annals.org http://hwmaint.annals.org/cgi/content/short/151/9/662?rss=1 Under conditions of constrained resources, cost-saving innovations may improve overall outcomes, even when they are slightly less effective than available options, by permitting more efficient reallocation of resources. The authors systematically reviewed all MEDLINE-cited cost–utility analyses written in English from 2002 to 2007 to identify and describe cost- and quality-decreasing medical innovations that might offer favorable "decrementally" cost-effective tradeoffs—defined as saving at least $100 000 per quality-adjusted life-year lost. Of 2128 cost-effectiveness ratios from 887 publications, only 9 comparisons (0.4% of total) described 8 innovations that were deemed to be decrementally cost-effective. Examples included percutaneous coronary intervention (instead of coronary artery bypass graft) for multivessel coronary disease, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (instead of electroconvulsive therapy) for drug-resistant major depression, watchful waiting for inguinal hernias, and hemodialyzer sterilization and reuse. On a per-patient basis, these innovations yielded savings from $122 to almost $12 000 but losses of 0.001 to 0.021 quality-adjusted life-years (approximately 8 hours to 1 week). These findings demonstrate the rarity of decrementally cost-effective innovations in the medical literature.

]]> Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:06:36 PST info:doi/10.1059/0003-4819-151-9-200911030-00011 American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine 9 151 667 2009-11-03 662 Academia and Clinic