engleski

Health technology assessment and pharmacoeconomics today

Health technology assessment (HTA) is a new rapidly developing field, accepted internationally as a multidisciplinary process that summarizes information about the medical, social, economic, and ethical issues related to the use of health technology (drugs, medical devices, procedures, etc.) in a systematic, transparent, unbiased and robust manner. The main aim of HTA is to support health policy decisions on different levels. Today, in many of developed and developing countries agencies for HTA have been established on national and also on international level. Part of HTA is health economy and pharmacoeconomics which can be defined as the branch of economics that uses four main types of evaluation (cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, cost-minimization, and cost-utility analyses) to compare pharmaceutical products and treatment strategies. These evaluations provide healthcare decision-makers with valuable information, allowing optimal allocation of limited resources. When conducting pharmacoeconomic analyses, researchers often struggle with limited local epidemiological and cost data. The most frequently used analysis is cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) which 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. CEA has been described as a technique for making decisions at the margin, in situations where the question may be framed as, “Is it worth spending an additional financial mean (e.g. Euro) to achieve the additional benefits offered by the new drug compared to existing therapy?” It would be complicated and time-consuming to rank all available health care technologies according to their cost-effectiveness, therefore the cost-effectiveness criteria are assessed mainly for the new and expensive therapies in the majority of countries. The importance of evidence based health policy is widely acknowledged among health care policy-makers all over the world. The transparent method of HTA may improve the consistency of pharmaceutical reimbursement decisions and makes this process in accordance to the Transparency Directive of the European Union. For the adequate usage of HTA process and pharmacoeconomics, health economic training and education of local professionals, including decision-makers, is of utmost importance.

pharmacoeconomics; cost-effectiveness; cost-utility; health technology assessment

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