On the Equivalence of Medical Cost Estimators with Censored Data

• Activity Number: 333
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 8, 2006 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Health Policy Statistics
• Author(s): Heejung Bang and Hongwei Zhao*+ and Phillip E. Pfeifer and Hongkun Wang
• Companies: Cornell University and University of Rochester and University of Virginia and University of Virginia
• Keywords: censoring ; cost analysis ; inverse probability-weighting ; survival analysis

Abstract

In clinical trials comparing different treatments and in health economics and outcomes research, medical costs are frequently analyzed to evaluate the economical impacts of new treatment options and economic values of health care utilization. Since Lin et al. (1997)'s first finding in the problem of applying the survival analysis techniques to the cost data, many new methods have been proposed. In this report, we establish analytic relationships among several widely adopted medical cost estimators that are seemingly different. Specifically, we report the equivalence among various estimators that appeared in Lin et al. (1997), Bang & Tsiatis (2000) and Zhao & Tian (2001). We identify conditions under which these estimators become identical and, consequently, the biased estimators achieve consistency.