What's in a perspective?

摘要

The history of pharmaceutical costing for use in cost-effectiveness studies has been marked more by convenience-what pricing data are readily available?-than by science-what opportunities are forgone when we use a particular drug? For too long, our field has relied on average wholesale price, when there is substantial evidence that it is an inappropriate measure 1,2. Thus, the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) Task Force on Good Research Practices-Use of Drug Costs for Cost Effectiveness Analysis reports on drug costing 3-8 is commendable.These reports describe in gory detail the intricacies of drug costing from five different perspectives: societal, managed care, US government, industry, and international. The documented complexity is magnified by the fact, well recognized by the authors, that much of the necessary information is proprietary and likely to be unavailable to researchers. The Task Force might have been better served giving as much thought to the objectives of published pharmacoeconomic studies as it did to the data needed for appropriate estimates for single payers/providers.