International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research

摘要

The science of pharmacoeconomics is a relatively new and rapidly evolving field which traces its roots to the broader discipline of health economics. The application of pharmacoeconomic principles serve as a major tool that aims to decrease health expenditures and optimise healthcare results. Pharmacoeconomics addresses both economic and humanistic issues and borrows ideas and methods from a variety of domains including clinical epidemiology, economics, statistics and psychometrics. The use of traditional biomedical measures, such as the results of laboratory tests, or mortality and morbidity figures are no longer considered a reliable measure of deciding if a treatment has been successful, this is also true for the outcomes of drug treatment. Clinical trials are now being designed to assess outcomes like Health Related Quality of Life indicators. At present the practice of pharmacoeconomics is seen as the specialized 'twin' of outcomes research which focuses more on pharmaceutical drugs as opposed to general healthcare services.