Introduction to the principal measures used in CEA: Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) and Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY).

QALY: measures the trade-off between the length and quality of life. Some insights into the construction of this indicator. How to measure the quality of life? The Visual Analogue Scale (VAS); Standard Gamble (SG); Time Trade-Off (TTO); EQ-5D; etc.

Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY): it combines the time lived with a disability and the time lost due to premature mortality. Some insights into the construction of this indicator. Some examples.

A brief reference to other measures to monitor changes in population health: healthy life expectancy (HLE); average life expectancy (ALE).

Introduction to Health Quality Assessment.

The problem of measuring the burden of disease. Introduction to cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), the most widely applied tool to guide policy decisions concerning the allocation of healthcare resources.

Introduction to the idea that cost-effectiveness studies can be designed to analyse competing interventions incorporating both cost and outcomes.

The concept of Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio (ICER), which is expressed as an incremental cost per incremental gain expressed in some natural unit.