Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

Before any attempt to address the issues implied in the article by Mohan and Miles (1) in this issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, a brief and deliberately simplistic review of methodologic basics may facilitate understanding by nonexpert readers of that article (1). Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is a method that selects among competing wants when resources are limited (2). First applied to health care in the mid-1960s, CEA can indeed serve as a tool for the optimization of