The value of public and private investment in clinical health services and economic research, which aims to reduce the burden of illnesses on patients, their families and society as a whole, is an issue that is currently being debated at national and international levels.

In good health care systems, the planning and purchasing of services for individual people should be based on individual needs assessments and outcome expectations. No two patients or users of a given service or programme are likely to present exactly the same symptoms or needs, or to experience exactly the same outcomes. They will have different personal and family circumstances, resources and preferences. Consequently, service responses should rarely be exactly identical.

Economic evaluations of new and existing pharmaceutical products are an essential input into decision-making in health care. Health care systems around the world face steady increases in the total cost of pharmaceuticals. Increasingly, health care funders have to choose which drugs are subsidised and which are not reimbursed from public funds. In psychiatry, a number of new pharmaceutical products have recently been developed for the treatment of depression and schizophrenia which cost considerably more than traditional pharmacological products. Governments and purchasers, with limited budgets and expanded demands for funding, require pharmaceutical companies to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of their new therapies. It is no longer sufficient to consider the clinical or therapeutic effects of new drugs: purchasing choices are predicted on studies which identify, measure and value what is given up when a product is used (the cost) and what is gained (improved health outcome).

Basic, clinical and services research all play important roles in generating scientific knowledge and, ultimately, in discovering and developing cost-effective treatments that help people with a given illness. Benefits of the treatments then extend to patients' families, their communities and the entire society – all of which are impacted by the negative economic and social consequences of the disease.

The treatment of people with severe and persistent mental illness entails long-term intervention and may be very costly, primarily due to their frequent use of acute and subacute treatment services or because of prolonged stays in health care institutions. Given the rising costs of health care and the decreasing public funding for treating people with severe mental illness, mental health professionals are adopting case management approaches to provide more efficient care to these individuals.