Hi everyone,
Efficacy, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness (along with cost-effectiveness analysis, or CEA) are concepts that are easy to mix up. While efficacy and effectiveness refer to how well an intervention works under tightly-controlled or real-world conditions, respectively, cost-effectiveness is a formal assessment of the trade-offs between the benefits, harms, and costs of interventions.
A new short (2 pages) paper in the JAMA Guide to Statistics and Methods provides an overview of CEA along with a brief example of its application in cancer screening. The paper is attached here and can also be found at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2728376.
There is also an interesting and provocative article on the use of robotics in cancer surgery and patient outcomes in the 3/13/19 New York Times Science section. The link is https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/health/robotic-surgery-cancer.html and the articles the author cites are analyses of the data from Commission on Cancer-accredited hospitals and the Surveillance, End Results, and Epidemiology (SEER) by Melamed et al and of a clinical trial conducted at MD Anderson Cancer Center by Ramirez et al, both published in the NEJM. These papers are available here and here, respectively, and the editorial accompanying the Ramirez paper is here.
Sincerely,
Scott Strassels, PharmD, PhD
Scientific Director, SHARP
scott.strassels@osumc.edu