engleski

Pharmacoeconomic analysis: cost-effectiveness

Pharmacoeconomics is a relatively new discipline, a branch of health economics that particularly considers drug therapy. Pharmacoeconomic evaluations provide a basis for resource allocation and utilization which is increasingly important for health policy decision-making and in some areas economic studies have become an accepted part of evaluations for reimbursement. Further, pharmacoeconomics should be of specific interest for clinical pharmacologists, either in their roles assessing new drugs, performing analysis, or in the conduct of clinical trials that now often include an economic component. Pharmacoeconomics is certainly of particular interest to pharmaceutical companies because in developing a new drug and after the traditional hurdles of efficacy, safety and tolerability it is obligatory (according to local legislative) to pass a fourth hurdle of cost effectiveness. Most frequently four techniques are used for economic evaluation, i.e. cost-minimization analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-utility analysis and cost-benefit analysis. The choice of the evaluation method depends on the nature of outcomes and the context in which the choices need to be made. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is a technique that is most appropriately applied when a choice must be made between two or more competing options for which the expected health gains can be expressed in terms of a common outcome measure. The aim of the workshop is to fulfill a global need for more training in pharmacoeconomics and specifically in appropriate using of CEA. In the near future in Croatia and other counties of the region we can expect that pharmacoeconomic analysis, especially CEA, will be obligatory for reimbursement decisions as a part of drugs evaluation process.

pharmacoeconomics; cost-effectiveness; reimbursement

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