Economic evaluations for service delivery in autism spectrum disorders: Benefit-cost analysis for emerging telehealth systems

Comparative full economic evaluations are needed to evaluate whether telehealth-based systems can bring societal cost savings and economic benefits that exceed economic costs. However, economic evaluations of telehealth-based interventions across different health care fields have focused primarily on cost analysis, rather than on full economic analysis, which captures both the economic costs and economic benefits of two or more competing interventions. The authors provide a framework for Benefit-Cost Analysis that would render this method more applied. In particular, they are interested in the comparative economic evaluation of two categories of Autism Spectrum Disorders intervention programs: telehealth-based and in-person. Their framework can be used to economically evaluate whether telehealth service delivery offers greater societal net benefits-the difference between societal economic benefits and societal economic costs-than in-person delivery, and the threshold volume of telehealth encounters required for the telehealth delivery to reach a zero societal net benefit.