Health Care Costs: Standardized Methods & Estimates for Research & Policy Applications

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) co-sponsored a workshop, Health Care Costs: Standardized Methods and Estimates for Research and Policy Applications, December 6 - 7, 2007, in Rockville, Maryland.

The workshop focused on arenas of application, approaches to framing cost analyses, approaches to calculating/imputing health care costs, and issues in the statistical analysis of cost data. Speakers and discussants included experts in health economics, epidemiology, health services research, and biostatistics from academia, industry, and government.

Specific goals were to:

• examine current applications and standard practices in health care cost estimation;
• discuss core methodological and empirical challenges;
• evaluate potential advantages and hurdles in developing standardized cost estimates;
• identify "best practices" in the measurement, statistical analysis, and application of health care costs; and
• inform the research agenda on improving data, methods, and the scientific quality and relevance of cost analyses.

View the workshop agenda and request copies of the presentations. This workshop led to the publication of a supplement to the journal Medical Care in 2009.