Evidence-Based Decision Making 7: Health Economics in Clinical Research

The pressure for health-care systems to provide more resource-intensive health care and newer more costly therapies is significant, despite limited health-care budgets. As such, demonstration that a new therapy is effective is no longer sufficient to ensure that it is funded within publicly funded health-care systems. The impact of a therapy on health-care costs is also an important consideration for decision makers who must allocate scarce resources. The clinical benefits and costs of a new therapy can be estimated simultaneously using economic evaluation; the strengths and limitations of which are discussed herein. In addition, within this chapter, we discuss the important economic outcomes that can be collected within a clinical trial (alongside the clinical outcome data) enabling consideration of the impact of the therapy on overall resource use, thus enabling performance of an economic evaluation, if the therapy is shown to be effective.