Abstract

Introduction Health economics is gaining increasing importance in cardiovascular disease management. This is not surprising given increasing numbers of therapies, devices and diagnostic tools available each year in an everlasting quest to prevent the further occurrence of cardiovascular events. The question that arrives inevitably then is - which therapies are their value (1). Given the increasing use of intracardiac defibrillators, cardiac resynchronisation, electrophysiological ablations and the impending wave of stem cell based technologies from myocyte replacement to cardiac autotransplantation, and the ever increasing array of diagnostic techniques from 4d-echocardiography to CT angiography, cardiac MRI and implantable reveal devices - cardiovascular spend continues to escalate and therefore clinicians need to appreciate and generate cost effectiveness data with which to inform clinical choices.