Concluding Remarks from the Extant Literature Examination

10 Concluding Remarks from the Extant Literature Examination

Delving into the past studies, Cost-Benefit Analysis is considered to be a comprehensive method of economic evaluation presenting many benefits as well as some drawbacks. To enhance its effectiveness CBA will be used in this research in the context described by Robert Brent (2003), as a general method that will include also Cost-Efficiency Analysis, Cost-Minimisation and Cost-Utility Analysis as its special cases. Problems such as valuing human life, identifying costs and future benefits and the issue of discounting costs and benefits, are issues that emerged from background knowledge and should be taken under consideration. From the analysis of the past literature, the value of human life in finite values can be assessed from the monetary compensation that an individual would ask φορ in order to work and live in a completely unsafe environment (Sugden and Williams, 1978). Benefits and cost are considered to be both discounted as literature shows that this is a way to produce correct outcomes from the evaluation process avoiding problems like the Postponing Paradox (Brent, 2003; Smith and Gravelle, 2000b; Keller and Cretin, 1983).

In order to obtain a monetary value of the benefits concerning the use of the medical websites that offer medical web-based services to the users/patients, the Willingness to Pay approach will be followed rather than the QALY approach, because as it was stated from the literature, the QALY approach focuses on transforming the outcomes of the improvement in the healthcare interventions into a specific duration and quality of life (Bala et al., 1998; Hammit, 2002). In addition to this, QALY approach and Cost Effectiveness analysis are mainly used of clinical outcomes while WTP can be used on assessing value from the health process itself rather than only from its outcomes (Ryan et al., 1997). Moreover, WTP transforms the outcomes of the improvement in the healthcare interventions into a universal monetary value, which is much easier to be used by the evaluation actors. The application of Willingness To Pay, contingent analysis, or in general “Stated Choice Experiment” methods have gained ground in the attempts to evaluate the behavioural responses of the public in general or a specific target group towards a specific scenario, product, service or attribute (Rose et al., 2009).

Finally, in addition to CBA, Return on Investment is considered a necessity to enhance decision making process in healthcare investments (Stone, 2005; Endogmus et al., 2004) offers accurate measurement on programmes results taking into account or excluding external influences as well as it offers a benchmark to the decision makers and analysts to organize better and set clear priorities as to which program to invest in between various alternatives (Phillips P. & J., 2008). By the estimation of the Return on Investment, which is the ratio of net benefits that a programme produces to the costs that it needs in order to operate and achieve the aforementioned benefits (Endogmus et al., 2004), we can offer a clear view of the evaluation results of the medical websites that offer medical web-based services.