Economic evaluation of dyslexia intervention.

In many countries, intervention costs are not covered by public health care. A critical basis for deciding whether an intervention is covered or not is to analyse the relation between benefits and costs of the intervention, and to quantify the consequential costs. In this study, a cost-utility analysis was computed to investigate the costs of individualized dyslexia intervention while quantifying the benefit in terms of health-related quality of life in a sample of 36 individuals with dyslexia.

[The QALY approach - potentials and limits].

The concept of quality-adjusted life expectancy ("quality-adjusted life years", QALY) is a type of cost-benefit analysis for health economic evaluation of treatment options. The two parameters quality of life and life expectancy are thereby combined into a single value - the QALY - which can shed light on the cost of therapy per additional quality-adjusted year of life. The concept is, however, widely used in ethical discussions of the adequacy of the generalizations on which this approach is based.

[The impact of health economics: a status report].

"Health is not everything, but without health, everything is nothing" (cited from Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher, 1788-1860). The relationship between medicine and economics could not have been put more precisely. On the one hand there is the need for a maximum of medical care and on the other hand the necessity to economize with scarce financial resources.