Abstract 449

Background: Recent advances in the development of techniques to measure costs and cost-effectiveness in the medical sector have improved physicians' abilities to optimize the impacts of care. In the past, the range of possible estimates was achieved by varying assumptions sequentially using a technique called sensitivity analysis. Another, less cumbersome method for assessing variability and statistical confidence intervals for cost-effectiveness ratios utilizes bootstrapping methods. Unlike sensitivity analyses, which are incapable of detecting interactions between various sources of variation, this nonparametric method uses variations in the data to account for these effects, and does not require the data to be normally distributed. There have been a number of articles on the subject of cost-effectiveness in the treatment of otitis media (OM), but they are only speculative and suggest employing conventional statistical techniques for assessing cost-effectiveness.

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