Quantity and Quality of Economic Evaluations in U.S. Nursing Research, 1997-2015: A Systematic Review

The United States has a complex healthcare system that is undergoing substantial reformations. There is a need for high-quality, economic evaluations of nursing practice. An updated review of completed economic evaluations relevant to the field of nursing within the U.S. healthcare system is timely and needed.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate and describe the quantity and quality of economic evaluations in nursing-relevant research performed in the United States between 1997 and 2015.

Four databases were searched. Titles, abstracts, and full-text content were reviewed to identify studies that analyzed both costs and outcomes, relevant to nursing, performed in the United States, and used the quality-adjusted life year to measure effectiveness. For included studies, data were extracted from full-text articles using criteria from U.S. Public Health Service's Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine.

Twenty-eight studies met the inclusion criteria. Most (n = 25, 89%) were published in the last decade of the analysis, from 2006 to 2015. Assessment of quality, based on selected items from the panel guidelines, found that the evaluations did not consistently use the recommended societal perspective, use multiple resource utilization categories, use constant dollars, discount future costs and outcomes, use a lifetime horizon, or include an indication of uncertainty in results. The only resource utilization category consistently included across studies was healthcare resources.

Only 28 nursing-related studies meeting the inclusion criteria were identified as meeting robust health economic evaluation methodological criteria, and most did not include all important guideline items. Despite increases in absolute numbers of published studies over the past decade, economic evaluation has been underutilized in U.S. nursing-relevant research in the past two decades.