[Recent developments in the economic evaluation of health]

The economic evaluation of health programmes and technologies is a booming discipline. A recent review estimated the volume of published studies in 1,800 per year, more than half of them being applied studies.

This article reviews the most relevant recent trends in the development of the discipline, which can be summarized as follows: a) cost-utility analysis has become a well established approach and cost-benefit analysis is growing very fast, although in absolute terms it still plays a minor role (many studies are presented as cost-consequence analyses, which means that health benefits are measured in different ways); b) there is an increasing relationship between economic evaluation and clinical research, which often forms the core of applied studies; c) there is an increasing concern for the issues related to the application of economic evaluation to decision-making; d) a related issue is the manifold proposal on methodological standards issued by different organizations and academic groups, with the aim of improving the comparability and transferability of the results, and e) finally, increasing attention is being paid to the knowledge, attitudes and actual use, of economic evaluation by decision-makers.

To sum up, economic evaluation appears to be very dynamic in its theoretical aspects, but it is also concerned with its ultimate justification of being a useful tool for decision-makers.