Health economic evaluation is about understanding the costs and effects of a healthcare service such as a new treatment or intervention. The same principles can be applied to different contexts.

This section will focus on the key aspects of different sterilization systems that are relevant to the analysis. These aspects included up-front costs of the sterilizer system, ongoing costs such as sterilizer products, electricity, water.  Other key factors include capacity and cycle length, waste and environmental considerations.

The next section will focus on the key aspects of the instruments being reprocessed. Much of this will be context specific, but this section of the webinar will highlight the types of factors to be considered such as how delicate the instruments are – including their susceptibility to damage from high temperatures and or water. It may also be important to consider how frequently items are used and how fast the turnaround time needs to be. Other key considerations include effect on need for repair or replacement of instruments and environmental considerations

The final section of the webinar will bring all the preceding sections together to show how the sterilizer and instrument factors can be used to evaluate the economics of different systems in different settings.