Register-based studies of healthcare costs.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: The aim of this paper is to provide an overview and a few examples of how national registers are used in analyses of healthcare costs in Denmark. RESEARCH TOPICS The paper focuses on health economic analyses based on register data. For the sake of simplicity, the studies are divided into three main categories economic evaluations of healthcare interventions, cost-of-illness analyses, and other analyses such as assessments of healthcare productivity. CONCLUSION: We examined a number of studies using register-based data on healthcare costs. Use of register-based data renders a comprehensive data material, often in the form of time series, which is very useful in health economic analyses. The disadvantage of register-based data is the use of tariffs, charges, or market prices as proxies for costs in the computation of healthcare costs.