EXPERT LECTURE: Countless thousands of patients die unnecessarily each year from medical errors and other lapses in the quality of their health care. Quality improvement interventions can address health service dysfunction and improve patient outcomes. But many decisionmakers believe such interventions are too expensive and inefficient. Making the business care for improving health care quality with sound economic analyses is becoming more important as budgets are tightened and administrators strive to improve efficiency. Using examples from US and international health care settings, this lecture discussed methods of cost-effectiveness analysis for such programs - why they are done, how they are performed and how to interpret their results. This information is crucial to anyone interested in understanding and performing economic evaluations of programs to make health care work better for everyone. #2011Conference #CostsEffectivenessBenefitsandEconomics