This department carries out research in the health sector, to which it contributes insights based on economics and management. Specifically, research in this department focuses on cost-benefit analyses of healthcare interventions and comparative analysis with foreign health care systems, especially in other European countries.

Aims:

• the primary objective of this line of research is to evaluate the economic impact of diseases and the available diagnostic-therapeutic alternatives. The types of analyses differ depending on whether they are observational studies of disease costs, or economic evaluation studies in the full sense (typically cost-effectiveness analyses);
• in the first case, the method used is to study cohorts of patients suffering from the same pathology for a significant period of time, in order to verify the relative consumption of healthcare resources, to be monetised then through the identification of unit costs of individual services. In particular, at the hospital level, the objective is to estimate unit costs using accounting data by cost centre, where available;
• in the second case, the cost analysis is supplemented by the evaluation of the effectiveness of the alternatives taken into consideration (therefore, information of a clinical nature, on the therapies analysed, is also collected), in order to calculate cost-effectiveness ratios.