DOI: 10.36347/sjds.2017.v04i04.004

Pages: 177-185

Health economics is a branch of Economics concerned with issues related to scarcity in the allocation of health and health care. Economic evaluation is necessary to produce the best health care and maximum benefit with minimum cost to the community based on available resources. Countries all over the world are facing increased burden of health care. Public fund available to the health sector are often short of what is required. This situation is a common feature in developing countries. Due to heavy disease burden and implementation of advanced technology, the cost of health care services has been increasing. In view of the problem of mismatch between demand and supply, health economics has become an important area of health care system. We know very well what kind of management we should do in what situation, but we don’t have fair idea about how feasible it will be for the entire population. Till date, most of the dental treatments are out of reach for the impoverished people as they cannot afford quality dental treatments because of their high cost. Very little work has been done to economically evaluate the diagnosis and treatment modalities available in the field of dentistry. Considering the limited availability of scientific literature on health economics in dentistry, our objective was to economically evaluate the available oral health care services concisely to enable decision-making and policy-making.