Impacto de diferentes métodos de asignación de costos indirectos estructurales de hospitales públicos, en el ranking costo-efectividad de 47 intervenciones en salud / Impact of different overhead cost allocation methods of public hospitals on the cost-effectiveness ranking of 47 health programs

Background: Costs allocation methods are important for economic evaluation of health care. Aim: To evaluate the impact of overhead costs rates of different hospitals on the cost-effectiveness rankings of health programs. Material and Methods: Using the cost reports from eight hospitals, a Montecarlo simulation was implemented, programming the complete micro-costing algorithm to calculate the final cost of 47 health care interventions, from the health sector perspective. The independent variables considered were the overhead cost rates per establishment and the actual overhead costs. Changing these variables, resulted in changes of the final cost of interventions and cost-effectiveness ratios. Finally the probabilities of changes in the cost-effectiveness ranking of each intervention were calculated. Results: Thirteen programs did not change their ranking order. However, 34 interventions modified their position with different occurrence probabilities. In the new proposed ranking, 21 programs changed their position from one to six places. Conclusions: Different overhead cost rates, representing different assignation forms, have a relative impact in the cost-effectiveness order. Montecarlo simulation can help to improve the accuracy of ranking assignment.

Generalized schemes for high-throughput manipulation of the Desulfovibrio vulgaris genome.

The ability to conduct advanced functional genomic studies of the thousands of sequenced bacteria has been hampered by the lack of available tools for making high-throughput chromosomal manipulations in a systematic manner that can be applied across diverse species. In this work, we highlight the use of synthetic biological tools to assemble custom suicide vectors with reusable and interchangeable DNA "parts" to facilitate chromosomal modification at designated loci. These constructs enable an array of downstream applications, including gene replacement and the creation of gene fusions with affinity purification or localization tags. We employed this approach to engineer chromosomal modifications in a bacterium that has previously proven difficult to manipulate genetically, Desulfovibrio vulgaris Hildenborough, to generate a library of over 700 strains. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these modifications can be used for examining metabolic pathways, protein-protein interactions, and protein localization. The ubiquity of suicide constructs in gene replacement throughout biology suggests that this approach can be applied to engineer a broad range of species for a diverse array of systems biological applications and is amenable to high-throughput implementation.