Lecture 1.1.3 | Price Collection | Masters in Health Economics
Why It Matters
Accurate, locally adjusted price data underpins credible cost‑effectiveness studies, directly influencing health policy and funding decisions.
Key Takeaways
- •Accurate price collection is foundational for reliable health economic models.
- •Use the three‑source rule to triangulate missing cost data.
- •Adjust prices for inflation, regional variation, and local taxes.
- •Combine national tariffs, supplier catalogs, and expert elicitation for pricing.
- •Local price data improves cost‑effectiveness decisions for policymakers.
Summary
The lecture introduces price collection as the backbone of health‑economic evaluations, emphasizing that inaccurate monetary inputs can invalidate cost‑effectiveness results. It frames price gathering as a systematic, "bad work" that must be done meticulously before any model is built.
Key insights include the three‑source rule for missing data, the need to adjust for inflation, regional price differentials, and local taxes, and the hierarchy of data sources: national tariff lists, supplier or manufacturer catalogs, and direct expert elicitation. Protocols for securing reliable local prices and using proxy values when direct data are unavailable are also detailed.
Illustrative examples range from a remote district clinic lacking a national price for a solar‑powered incubator to using expert panels to estimate prices for novel medical devices. The speaker demonstrates how to compute weighted averages, conduct sensitivity analyses, and apply proxy pricing while maintaining methodological rigor.
The implications are clear: robust price collection enhances the credibility of budget‑impact and cost‑effectiveness analyses, informs policymakers about true affordability, and ensures that health interventions are evaluated on a comparable economic footing across regions.
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