Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Thyroid Testing Strategies

Over the past 14 years the techniques of clinical decision analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis have been introduced to medicine, and within the last decade these tools have been adopted by academic laboratory scientists. In today’s environment, the laboratory director must consider the introduction of new or enhanced laboratory tests as a comparative problem: how does the novel procedure or analyte fit into both the clinical information stream and in the milieu of existing tests?1 Although a considerable literature deals with problems of technical accuracy and precision in analytic laboratory medicine, this is not true for problems of clinical efficacy and economy.