engleski

Pharmacoeconomics: How It Can Be Applied To Support Decisions In Health Care?

The problem of the limited health care resources is worldwide present, and this logically leads to increased interest in assessing the value for money, or economic efficiency, of new medicines and therapies. The cornerstone in this process of assessment belongs to pharmacoeconomics, which is defined as a scientific discipline that analyses the values of one medicine or medical intervention to another. Pharmacoeconomic evaluation is relevant to decisions about the pricing and reimbursement of different procedures and health technologies, since it offers a way of estimating the additional value to society of a new intervention (e.g., medicine) in comparison to existing therapy. The most frequently used pharmacoeconomic analysis includes cost-effectiveness (CEA) and cost-utility analyses (CUA). These techniques are 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. It is necessary to emphasize that pharmacoeconomic evaluation as a part of health technology assessment (HTA) is applicable to review therapeutic areas and especially with significant budget impact, including the revision of therapeutic guidelines and financing protocols and delisting of previously reimbursed pharmaceuticals. The importance of such an evidence-based health policy is widely acknowledged among health care policy-makers all over the world. Pharmacoeconomics as part of HTA is a transparent process that provides health care decision-makers with valuable information. This is used in a decision concerning the optimal health care resource allocation in a standardized and scientifically consistent process.

Pharmacoeconomics ; Reimbursement ; Health Technology Assessment

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