META-ANALYSIS, DECISION ANALYSIS AND COST-EFFECTIVENESS ANALYSIS: METHODS FOR QUANTITATIVE SYNTHESIS IN MEDICINE.

✍ Scribed by JONATHAN J. DEEKS

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 190 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0277-6715
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0258(19960730)15:14<1601::aid-sim329>3.0.co;2-3

✦ Synopsis

This book brings together three sets of 'synthetic' research techniques: systematic reviews, decision analysis and economic evaluations. Although the last two topics have often been combined in the same text, never have they been accompanied by comprehensive guidance for undertaking systematic reviews. Published economic evaluations and decision analyses are often criticized for a lack of rigour in their estimates of probabilities, utilities and costs. Typically estimates have been based on individual papers, opinion, or uncritical and unsystematic reviews. As cost-effectiveness and decision analyses are becoming widely used in the assessment of health technologies, and as health policy decisions are more commonly being based on their findings, the arrival of a text which combines information on modelling techniques with a description of a methodology for obtaining the best estimates of the required parameters is timely.

In her preface, Petitti sets the book in the context of fostering rational health policy decision-making based on the systematic use of information already available. The book is aimed at novices in the field, and she takes it as her brief to provide enough information to enable them to perform a simple analysis. The reader is regularly referred to classical texts in each of the three fields for more extensive detail and explanation. A basic understanding of biostatistics and epidemiology is assumed.

The chapters can be considered in five blocks. Chapters 1-3 introduce each of the methods in turn. A single example considering the provision of