Health care in the 21st century: evidence-based medicine, patient preference-based quality, and cost effectiveness.

The combination of evidence-based medicine, patient-based preferences using utility analysis, and econometric modeling yields a model to evaluate the incremental cost effectiveness of health care interventions. This methodology allows a comparison of the cost effectiveness of virtually all health care interventions and incorporates the patient voice to provide an information system that can improve the quality of health care and simultaneously reduce costs. It has been estimated that such an information system could save more than $90 billion per year of the annual $1.3 trillion health care bill in the United States.