Economic evaluation: its role and value for healthcare decision-making

Given the increasing tension between healthcare needs/expenditures and limited healthcare resources, it is important to help decision makers to efficiently allocate healthcare resources. In this context, economic evaluation provides a relevant framework to identify and compare the costs and outcomes of healthcare interventions. Economic evaluations are nowadays formally requested in drug reimbursement process in most European countries and are also increasingly used to assess the economic value of many other healthcare interventions. This paper aims to introduce the roles of economic evaluation in healthcare, the types of economic evaluation, the methods for economic evaluation, how to present the results of an economic evaluation and it discusses some guidelines for the conduct of economic evaluations. Economic evaluation represents a powerful tool to help decision makers to efficiently allocate resources at the condition to be appropriately conducted. It is therefore important to increase the quality of economic evaluations and to adequately use them in healthcare decision-making process.