Journal of

Background: The scarcity of resources and growing demand for health care, as well as moral, socioeconomic and political imperatives for efficient use of resources, make cost information and adoption of an accurate methodology an integral part of the modern management.
Materials & Methods: At first, a research protocol including literature review strategies, inclusion and exclusion criteria and data gathering methods, was designed. Afterwards, using an electronic search of several databases, some relevant studies were identified.
Results: In the costing literature the economic and accounting approaches are distinguishable. Two methods of marginal and average unit cost analyses are attributable to these approaches. Considering the type of the problem to be decided about and cost targets, costing methods can be different. Factors such as types of cost analyses and economic evaluation, timing overview, analysis approach and advantage or disadvantage of economy of scale have a significant role in determining the costs.
Conclusion: Having no consensus of opinion on the most appropriate principles to use in costing process is one of the main challenges of the time. There is a trade-off between the accuracy and cost of achieving cost information... Therefore, standardization of costing methodologies and adoption of comprehensive approaches for the main issues will predispose an economical international and organizational comparability.

Background: Chronic renal failure disease is considered as a health problem . Because of their high prevalence and economic burden on the society, health system managers consider to the disease as a public health concern.  This study aimed at comparing the cost-effectiveness of long-term dialysis treatments and kidney transplant using DALY index.

Materials and Methods:This cross-sectional study was designed to compare the cost-effectiveness of two methods such as long-term hemodialysis and kidney transplant using Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) in Afzalipour Hospital of Kerman in 2012. The decision tree model and TreeAge software were used for data analysis. In this research, costs and effects were studied from the patient perspective.

Results: The cost of a kidney transplant was 165 million Rials, effectiveness of a kidney transplant was 4.40 DALY, chronic dialysis cost was 1.283 billion Rials and its effectiveness was 6.52 DALY. Cost-effectiveness ratio for dialysis was 196 million Rials per DALY and this ratio is 37 million Rials per DALY for a kidney transplant respectively. According to the findings, kidney transplant is more cost effective than dialysis.

Conclusion: This study suggests kidney transplant over dialysis due to its better quality of life and more life expectancy. The results can help out the government to decide about the more resource allocation to kidney transplant programs. The method in this research can be applied to measure the cost-effectiveness of other organs transplantation.