Health economics is a branch of economics concerned will) the formal comparison
of costs and consequences of health care. One of the seminal papers in this
field was written by Neuhauser and Lweicki, who in 1975 applied a rule of
diminishing returns to predict that the cost per cancer death prevented by the
sixth in a series of six repeated fecal occult blood tests exceeded one million
dollars. Health economics uses mathematical models to synthesize data from
biostatistics and epidemiology for support of medical decision making. Since
about 10 years health economics integrates the wider domain of strategic health
management.