Using economic evidence in clinical practice

Clinicians and health policy decision makers find themselves increasingly interested in economic evaluations. The purposes of this article are to review the types of economic analyses available to clinicians, discuss the measurement of costs in economic evaluations, review recommendations for standardization of cost-effectiveness analyses, and review strategies to integrate economic evidence in the establishment of evidence-based practice. A worksheet is presented that may be useful in the critiquing of economic evaluations for validity and applicability to clinical settings. Increased understanding of the methods employed to assess the rigor of the economic evaluations is needed by busy clinicians and health policy decision makers for economic evidence to be routinely applied in practice.