Estudios de farmacoeconomía: ¿Por qué, cómo, cuándo y para qué?

Abstract

Currently, resources that may be spent in pharmacoeconomics expenditure are limited so it is necessary to rationalize their consumption and priorize in the allocation of these resources to the options with higher economic advantages. Pharmacoeconomic studies will permit us to know what is the efficiency of different therapeutic alternatives so they will help to determine the therapeutic options that we should use in routine medical practice. We have different pharmacoeconomic studies: cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-utility analysis, cost-minimization analysis and cost of disease studies. They can be performed by using prospective designs (alongside clinical trials and observational studies), retrospective and predictive designs (by carrying out pharmacoeconomic models), and integrating in the different phases of clinical development programs of new medicines. The information of pharmacoeconomic studies will be important when negotiating price and reimbursement of new drugs as well as if we want that in both Primary Health Care and Hospital Care settings the therapeutic alternatives with the best cost/effectiveness relationship will be used routinarely.