Time to Assess Cost-Effectiveness of Technologies in Dentistry

Objective: Health economic evaluations provide decision makers with important information regarding the cost-effectiveness of technologies. However, such evaluations are still rare in most dental areas, and there is furthermore a need for methodological development in estimating costeffectiveness within dentistry. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of methods used for estimating cost-effectiveness, and provide guidance for performing health economic evaluations within dentistry. Methods: Available health economics methods are discussed and analysed according to their usefulness when assessing cost-effectiveness in dentistry. Results: All types of health economic analyses may be suitable for evaluation in dentistry. It is most important that the outcome should be relevant to the decision problem. For this reason, various clinical outcomes are often used, such as DMFT or mm adjustment, number of infections, construction survival, etc. depending on what technology is assessed. It would be of value to also use quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) as this is the most commonly used outcome measure in health economic evaluation, but this has rarely been done. Conclusion: There is a need for more health economic evaluations within dentistry to be able to use scarce resources efficiently. In this paper we discuss methods for how this can be done, with a focus on the use of outcome measures relevant for decision makers.