1. Pharmacoeconomics identifies, measures, and compares the costs and consequences of drug therapy to health care
systems and society.
2. The perspective of a pharmacoeconomic evaluation is paramount because the study results will be highly dependent on the perspective selected.
3. Health care costs can be categorized as direct medical, direct nonmedical, indirect nonmedical, intangible, opportunity, and incremental costs.
4. Economic, humanistic, and clinical outcomes should be considered and valued using pharmacoeconomic methods,
to inform local decision making whenever possible.
5. To compare various health care choices, economic valuation methods are used, including cost-minimization, cost-benefit, costeffectiveness, and cost-utility analyses.
These methods all provide the means to compare competing treatment options and are similar in the way they measure
costs (dollar units).
They differ, however, in their measurement of outcomes and expression of results.
6. In today’s health care settings, pharmacoeconomic methods can be applied for effective formulary management, individual patient treatment, medication policy determination,and resource allocation.
7. When evaluating published pharmacoeconomic studies, the following factors should be considered: study objective, study perspective, pharmacoeconomic method, study
design, choice of interventions, costs and consequences,
discounting, study results, sensitivity analysis, study conclusions, and sponsorship.
8. Use of economic models and performance of pharmacoeconomic analyses on a local level both can be useful and relevant sources of pharmacoeconomic data when rigorous methods are employed, as outlined in this chapter.
Today’s cost-sensitive health care environment has created a competitive and challenging workplace for clinicians. Competition for
diminishing resources has necessitated that the appraisal of health
care goods and services extends beyond evaluations of safety and efficacy and considers the economic impact of these goods and services
on the cost of health care. A challenge for health care professionals is to provide quality patient care with minimal resources.
An interest in defining the value of medicine is a common thread that unites today’s health care practitioners. With serious concerns
about rising medication costs and consistent pressure to decrease pharmacy expenditures and budgets, clinicians/prescribers, pharmacists,
and other health care professionals must answer the question,
“What is the value of the pharmaceutical goods and services I provide?”
1. Pharmacoeconomics, or the discipline of placing a value on drug therapy,
has evolved to answer this question.
Challenged to provide high-quality patient care in the least expensive way, clinicians have developed strategies aimed at contain-
ing costs. However, most of these strategies focus solely on determining the least expensive alternative rather than the alternative that
represents the best value for the money. The “cheapest” alternative with respect to drug acquisition cost is not always the best value for
patients, departments, institutions, and health care systems.
Quality patient care must not be compromised while attempting
to contain costs. The products and services delivered by today’s health
professionals should demonstrate pharmacoeconomic value, that is,
a balance of economic, humanistic, and clinical outcomes. Pharmacoeconomics can provide the systematic means for this quantification.
This chapter discusses the principles and methods of pharmacoeconomics and how they can be applied to clinical pharmacy practice and
thereby how they can assist in the valuation of pharmacotherapy and
other modalities of treatment in clinical practice.
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