Public health economics play a leading role in optimizing scarce resources to improve health outcomes. It provides a foundation for the understanding of health economics as applied in the wider context of health services research. Public health economics exposes the student to the wider related academic disciplines of importance in understanding the interaction of economics and global health, such as epidemiology, public health and policy analysis. 

Radiology and public health have an emerging opportunity to collaborate, in which radiology's vast supply of imaging data can be integrated into public health information systems for epidemiologic assessments and responses to population health problems.