Week of 09/14/09

Content:
Both lectures this week were on economics in Biomedical Informatics.  One of the topics covered was methods of analyzing costs and benefits.  Three of those methods were benefit-cost analysis, cost effectiveness analysis, and cost utility analysis.  Another topic covered was the steps that should be preformed to conduct an economic evaluation.  Some economic terms were defined such as the term perspective.  Perspective refers to which group of people's perspective the costs and benefits are occurring.  Some of those perspectives are of societies, governments, and health insurers.  Another term that was defined was opportunity cost.  Opportunity costs are the values of alternative resources that could be used instead of a resource.  Also, discount rate was a term discussed.  That rate refers to the difference between the future and present values of a resource.  Additionally, criteria that should be applied to reviewing articles was taught.  Specifically, applying that criteria to studies of health IT including EMRs was covered.  A article by the authors of Menachemi and Brooks analyzed health IT studies and suggested that there are relatively few health IT ROI studies because of the difficulty in estimating ROI.  An example of that type of difficulty is that in those ROI studies benefits can be harder to monetize than costs.  Due to that difference in monetization, benefits can be underrepresented.

I found the definitions of the economic terms to be interesting.  Opportunity costs are particularly interesting to me.  When I am thinking about buying something I sometimes consider that I like what I am thinking about buying but there may be a greater use of my money.  Researching alternatives has made a huge difference for me in the past in terms of understanding variations in products.  It has also made a huge difference for me in anticipating the large number of ways in which those products can be used over time.  Here is a web site that has given me valuable deals in the past and helped me with researching computer component purchases:  http://shopper.cnet.com/ .  In addition, the lectures also intrigued me to think about how to classify complex financial relationships between societies, governments, and individual citizens.  Furthermore, the homework articles impressed me in their accounting for the large number of types of costs and benefits that can exist in products.

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Nate