Recommendations for Reporting Pharmacoeconomic Evaluations in Egypt

Introduction of economic evaluations for pharmaceuticals or other health technologies can help the optimization of outcomes from resource allocations. This article aims to provide recommendations for researchers in presenting pharmacoeconomic evaluations in Egypt with special focus on pricing and/or reimbursement applications of pharmaceuticals.

The Minister of Health approved the initiative of establishing a focus group of decision makers that included academic and industry experts with experience in health economics, pharmacovigilance, and clinical pharmacy. The focus group has reviewed 17 economic evaluation guidelines available on the Web site of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research for reporting health economic evaluations. To develop core assumptions before preparing a draft report, focus group meetings were held on a regular basis starting June 2012. The recommendations were developed by using the Quasi-Delphi method, taking into account current practices and capacities for conducting pharmacoeconomic evaluations in Egypt.

Worldwide, health care decision makers are challenged to set priorities in an environment in which the demand for health care services outweighs the allocated resources. Effective pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement systems, based on health technology assessment (HTA) that encompasses economic evaluations, are essential to an efficient sustainable health care system. The Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population was encouraged to establish a pharmacoeconomic unit, as an initial step, for the support of pricing and reimbursement decisions. We anticipate that standardization of reporting would lead to a progressive improvement in the quality of submissions over time and provide the Egyptian health care system with health economic evidence often unavailable in the past. Therefore, recommendations for pharmacoeconomic evaluations provide an essential tool for the support of a transparent and uniform process in the evaluation of the clinical benefit and costs of drugs that do not rely on the use of low acquisition cost as the primary basis for selection. These recommendations will help inform health care decisions in improving health care systems and achieving better health for the Egyptian population.