Measuring cost-effectiveness of new medical technologies

To decide whether a new medical technology is cost effective, researchers often "compar[e] a new technology's incremental cost-effectiveness ratio or ICER to a threshold that is some multiple of a country or income group's GDP per capita, per WHO convention," Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), writes in the CGD's "Global Health Policy" blog. "In practice however, GDP-based thresholds have little empirical basis, as Shilcutt and co-authors lay out in their excellent review of decision rules and their use in studies related to low- and middle-income countries (LMIC)," she continues and describes the report (2/5).