HPSS 2008
 PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION
P7 - Evaluation of methods for estimating the incremental costs of providing behavioral change services in primary care physician practices.
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*Martey Dodoo, The Robert Graham Center: Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care 

Keywords: economic evaluation, costs, health intervention, primary care

To decide whether a treatment or intervention is worth implementing in a medical practice and paying for it, many health policy-makers, insurers and payers now demand that researchers also provide estimates of the cost of these interventions. In this study, we collected economics data from nine primary care physician practices nationwide and estimated the incremental and start-up costs of providing behavioral change services. Because the interventions were different, we used slightly different methods to collect and calculate the economic costs of each of the interventions. We report on our evaluation of these methods, and conclude that each of these estimation methods has merit. We also report on the results of our estimates of the incremental costs of implementing these basic medical interventions in primary care physician practices.