Economic Evaluation in the Critical Care Literature

Two interwoven themes have emerged over the last decade which illustrate the compelling need for more rigorous economic evaluation in the future of critical care research. First, the current tension over spiralling health care costs has reached its pinnacle in discussions about scarce resource allocation to the intensive care unit (ICU). In this setting, critically ill patients consume a large proportion of hospital budgets, usually in the last few days of life [1]. Thus, the highly skilled personnel, and complex, expensive technology utilized in the ICU make it particularly vulnerable to increasing health care costs [2].