Abstract
In the last years, the growing interest of healthcare professionals, policy-makers, and other stakeholders in enlarging the role of economic evaluations was driven by several factors such as evidence-based healthcare culture, patient-centered actions, and quality-linked incentives, associated with an important increase of financial constraints and pressures on healthcare budgets. Pharmacoeconomics, as a branch of health economics, focuses on balancing the costs and benefits (i.e., consequences) of an intervention towards the use of limited resources, aiming at maximizing value to patients, healthcare payers, and society. These concepts are part of the Health Technology Assessment process that informs clinical and governmental players about medical, social, and economic implications of development, diffusion, and use of health technologies. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the important concepts in pharmacoeconomic analysis methods, including studies classification (e.g., budget-impact analysis, cost-minimization analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-utility analysis), types of costs and outcomes, modeling approaches (e.g., decision trees or state transition models), and new trending analysis (e.g., value of information and value-based healthcare analyses), and additionally discuss some recommendations for future studies towards evidence synthesis and practical application.
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Tonin, F.S., Leonart, L.P., Casas, C. (2022). Pharmacoeconomic Analysis Methods. In: Encyclopedia of Evidence in Pharmaceutical Public Health and Health Services Research in Pharmacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50247-8_130-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50247-8_130-1
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