The science of health technology assessment--the economic perspective

Economic evaluation is a component of health technology assessment. Methods for economic evaluation began to be developed about 30 years ago. More recently, governments have encouraged the development of methodological and reporting guidelines for economic evaluation in health care with the major focus being placed on pharmaceutical products. There are two aspects of economic evaluations discussed in the present paper: the science of the techniques used and the utility of the resulting evaluations. Although activity is increasing in this area, it is still not clear how useful such 'value for money' evaluations have actually been and how much they have been used. It seems that the 'value for money' of 'value for money' evaluations of pharmaceutical products has yet to be shown.