Research Methodology

The Health Services and Economics Branch supports research into methodological issues related to conceptualizing, measuring, and analyzing health economics and health services factors. These factors include:

• economic cost and resource utilization;
• health status; and
• socio-demographic, socio-economic, health system and community factors.

We have collaborated on several related projects to improve health care cost estimation methodology. A July 2009 supplement to the journal Medical Care examined a range of issues on this topic. The supplement is based on a December 2007 workshop, which brought together experts in health economics, epidemiology, health services research, and biostatistics to discuss ways to improve and apply health care cost estimation methods and to inform a research agenda in this area.

We co-sponsored an interdisciplinary and international 2010 workshop, Combining Epidemiology & Economics for Measurement of Cancer Costs.

We also support the development, validation, and dissemination of survey and data abstraction instruments for collecting these kinds of data.

We make available survey instruments that have been used in various NCI-sponsored studies and NCI-supported research networks.

Our bibliography of publications on research methodology lists articles on methodologic issues in health economics and health services research.