Methods Derived from Economics and Decision Analysis Whereas many health measures were developed by clinicians whose interest lay in recording the health of individual patients, economists have contributed mainly to measures intended to be applied to groups of people. To allocate medical resources rationally, we need a way to compare the health benefits achieved per unit cost for different medical interventions. A table listing such benefits could guide policy in directing resources away from procedures that are relatively expensive for a given level of health benefit toward those that are cheaper. While economists debate details of assessing both the cost and benefit components, we are concerned here only with the measurement of benefits. Because the economists’ focus has been on the general rather than the particular, the econometric approach has tended to develop health indexes rather than profiles and has focused attention on details of scaling rather than question wording.