UK Those involved in funding and providing dental health services need to minimise costs, whilst maximising its provision and outcomes for patients. Health care professionals themselves have an imperative to maximise clinical outcomes and satisfy patients' wishes to maximise dental health related quality of life. Economic evaluation Enables alternative methods or techniques in dentistry to be compared as regards effectiveness, cost and patients' quality of life. In economic terms, efficiency means more than money.
Poor outcome is also a cost to patients and society.
There are four major analytical techniques that simply use money as a means of valuing a health care service and its outcomes. The main reason for attempting to place a value on oral health care is to allow choices of resource allocation to be made and thus to maximise the benefit gained from a finite resource. A technique new to dentistry, conjoint analysis, provides a method of investigating the impact of different attributes on the overall benefit obtained from oral health care and establishing how individuals trade health outcomes, non-health outcomes and process outcomes. From a series of pairwise choices, it is possible to determine the relative importance of the individual attributes of the service and the total satisfaction or utility for different combinations of attributes which in turn can be broken down to produce utility weights for individual attributes. This technique may facilitate valuation of oral health care and will be useful in evaluating more than just the health outcomes of these services.