ArticleHealth affairs (Project Hope)2015
Quality-adjusted cost of care: a meaningful way to measure growth in innovation cost versus the value of health gains.
Article in Health affairs (Project Hope), 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Optimizing Biomedical Health Efficiency: Unlocking the Full Potential of Life Science Innovation Through System Design.Therapeutic innovation & regulatory science · 2025Article
- An analysis of US net cancer drug launch prices and clinical efficacy and certainty of evidence from 2008 to 2022.Health affairs scholar · 2025Article
- Article
- Data-Driven Technologies as Enablers for Value Creation in the Prevention of Surgical Site Infections: a Systematic Review.Journal of healthcare informatics research · 2023Review
- A Satellite Account for Health in the United States.The American economic review · 2022Article
- The value of survival gains from therapeutic innovations for US patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma.Therapeutic advances in hematology · 2021Article
- Are quality-adjusted medical prices declining for chronic disease? Evidence from diabetes care in four health systems.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2020Article
- Article
- The changing cost of breast cancer care: lessons from a centralised modern cancer centre.Irish journal of medical science · 2019Article
- Assessing Variation in the Cost of Palivizumab for Respiratory Syncytial Virus Prevention in Preterm Infants.PharmacoEconomics - open · 2018Article
- Temporal Trends in Survival and Healthcare Costs in Patients with Multiple Myeloma in the United States.American health & drug benefits · 2018Article
- Review
- Chemotherapy Use in the Months Before Death and Estimated Costs of Care in the Last Week of Life.Journal of pain and symptom management · 2016Article
- Challenging Perceptions About Oncology Product Pricing in Breast and Colorectal Cancer.Pharmaceutical medicine · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Technology drives both health care spending and health improvement. Yet policy makers rarely see measures of cost growth that account for both effects. To fill this gap, we present the quality-adjusted cost of care, which illustrates cost growth net of growth in the value of health improvements, measured as survival gains multiplied by the value of survival. We applied the quality-adjusted cost of care to two cases. For colorectal cancer, drug cost per patient increased by $34,493 between 1998 and 2005 as a result of new drug launches, but value from offsetting health improvements netted a modest $1,377 increase in quality-adjusted cost of care. For multiple myeloma, new therapies increased treatment cost by $72,937 between 2004 and 2009, but offsetting health benefits lowered overall quality-adjusted cost of care by $67,863. However, patients with multiple myeloma on established first-line therapies saw costs rise without corresponding benefits. All three examples document rapid cost growth, but they provide starkly different answers to the question of whether society got what it paid for.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.