Economic evaluation of implementation strategies in health care

Economic evaluations can inform decisions about the efficiency and allocation of resources to implementation strategies—strategies explicitly designed to inform care providers and patients about the best available research evidence and to enhance its use in their practices. These strategies are increasingly popular in health care, especially in light of growing concerns about quality of care and limits on resources. But such concerns have hardly motivated health authorities and other decision-makers to spend on some form of economic evaluation in their assessments of implementation strategies. This editorial addresses the importance of economic evaluation in the context of implementation science—particularly, how these analyses can be most efficiently incorporated into decision-making processes about implementation strategies.