Health benefits/effects/aspects

Imagine a fully developed IT system where all important information on an individual person s health-related aspects are stored, easy searchable and safely available for communication and systematic support for decisions and also follow up of interventions, by the patient and health care providers. Of course there are several potential drawbacks to this but from a patient health care perspective the benefits are clear. In UK a large scale IT project Connecting for Health are supposed to support the UK-NHS in providing better, safer care, by delivering computer systems and services that improve how patient information is stored and accessed (NHS 2004). This could be one way to start up. However the patient perspective on, communication, learning, responsibility, knowledge, follow-up on effects etcetera must be supported. 

The major features of treatment guidelines concern indications for treatment, the particular treatments to be used, and in the case of biomedical risk factors, target levels following intervention. Figure 2 shows how these aspects are informed by clinical trials. In particular, net benefit depends on the absolute risk reduction (related to both baseline risk and relative risk reduction) and safety of the treatment. The greater the risk of the patient group or individual for future events, the greater is the absolute risk reduction with therapy (Fig. 3). Health policy decisions are informed not only by outcome data but also by cost-effectiveness analyses, Cost-effectiveness in turn relates to the absolute benefits that are observed. 

The publication of the results of clinical trials and preclinical research has resulted in the general understanding that biopharmaceuticals can be toxic as well as beneficial in humans and animals and that many aspects of their toxicity can be studied with relevance in animals. Toxicology as a science has benefited from this experience in many ways by improved and widely applicable understanding of basic biological mechanisms of health and disease and the introduction of novel methods to detect and assess effects. Case-by-case assessment based on science encourages scientific advancement in toxicology and infuses excitement and quality research into safety assessment. 

Journal of Health Economics. Amsterdam Elsevier. Bimonthly. ISSN 0167-6296. Contains articles on the economics of health and medical care. Its scope includes the following topics production of health and health services demand and utilization of health services financing of health services cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses and issues of budgeting and efficiency and distributional aspects of health policy. 

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