Health economics is a branch of economics concerned with the formal comparison of costs and consequences of health care. A seminal paper was written by Neuhauser and Lweicki, who in 1975 applied a rule of diminishing returns to predict that the cost per cancer death prevented by the sixth in a series of six repeated fecal occult blood tests exceeded one million dollars.
Health economics uses mathematical models to synthesise data from biostatistics and epidemiology for support of medical decision making, both for individuals and for wider health policy.