A cost-effectiveness study

As the costs of cancer care rise, modern radiation oncology treatments must prove their value. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is a mathematical approach that quantifies costs associated with interventions per unit health and can be used to compare multiple treatment approaches. In this chapter, we provide a framework of how to design a CEA study, which entails conceptualizing a research question, building a Markov model, and testing the robustness of the CEA outcomes by accounting for uncertainty in model parameters. CEA studies provide one measure that can be used to inform policy; results should be interpreted in the context of study limitations and generalizability.