TITLE:
On the Foundations of Guidelines for Health Economic Assessment
AUTHORS:
Hans Keiding
KEYWORDS:
Cost-Effectiveness, Value of Information, Blackwell’s Theorem, Guidelines
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.4 No.5,
May
16,
2016
ABSTRACT: In recent years,
increased attention has been given to guidelines for cost-effectiveness
analysis of medical interventions, and some of these guidelines (such as NICE
[1]) have become rather influential. In the paper, we present a model of
retrieving and processing information to be used for the study of guidelines
and their use. Our main result, which relies on a version of the theorem of
Blackwell [2], shows that in cases where there are sufficiently many decisions
to be made on the basis of the information obtained, there can be no other
objective ranking of methods than the trivial one ranking more information is
higher than less information. In our context, this means that guidelines may
have administrative advantages but cannot be considered as a scientifically
based approach to better decision making.