An Introduction to Costing and the Types of Costs Used within Health Economic Studies

If you’ve ever built (or read) a health economic model and felt unsure whether a “cost” meant a price, a charge, a reimbursement rate, or the true value of resources used, you are not alone. A recent open-access paper tackles this exact problem by offering a practical overview of common cost types and key costing terms used in health economics, while also pointing out how inconsistently these terms are applied across studies.  

This paper, titled “An Introduction to Costing and the Types of Costs Used within Health Economic Studies” focuses on one of the fundamental components of health economic evaluations and is part of a series of papers on health economic evaluations that seeks to demystify health economic evaluations and provide a practical guide for researchers. 

One of the main reminders in the paper is deceptively simple: cost categories often overlap. Definitions aren’t always mutually exclusive or neatly “additive,” and the same term can be used differently depending on the study context. That matters because what you include in your costing study depends heavily on the perspective (e.g., government vs. societal), which directly shapes the inputs you put into your analysis and how decision makers interpret your results.  

The paper also walks through common “behind-the-scenes” adjustments that are easy to overlook but crucial for credibility, like inflation adjustments, discounting, and currency conversion, including how real-world features such as economies of scale can shift cost estimates.  

Are you conducting a costing study?

Learn more about costing at the following link for full text: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12559562/