Article type
Year
Abstract
Introduction: Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is not yet routine in France. However, there is an increasing demand from decision-makers within the health care system for recommendations in this area. The relative cost and efficacy of new technologies can be evaluated by a critical appraisal of the economic literature which has seen an exponential rise over recent years.
Objectives: Our aim was to evaluate how much high-grade economic literature is available by analyzing the number, source and quality of the references we retrieved when preparing 8 HTA reports published by the ANAES since 1994. The topics related to screening programmes, implantable devices and imaging modalities.
Methods: In preparing the reports we sought relevant economic studies by (i) searching MEDLINE, EMBASE Healthstar, Pascal and the NHS Economic Evaluation Database using economic and topic-related key-words, (ii) hand-searching the tables of contents of general medicine journals and of 5-10 specialty journals per topic, and (iii) seeking out unpublished data (reports, conference proceedings). Those studies that met a defined set of inclusion criteria were retained for analysis for quality of methodology and data.
Results: Electronic searching provided an average of 101 economic articles per topic (range : 14-195) of which 6 (range : 2-16) were of acceptable quality. Except for 2 reports, good quality references represented between 2 and 7 % of all articles identified. These economic references were often cost-minimisation studies (46 out of 61), sometimes cost-effectiveness studies (14 out of 61) and rarely cost-utility evaluations (1 out of 61).
Discussion: Use of bibliographic databases provides a fair number of references to economic evaluations but these are of varying quality and reliability. In fact, very few can be considered adequate for HTA.
Objectives: Our aim was to evaluate how much high-grade economic literature is available by analyzing the number, source and quality of the references we retrieved when preparing 8 HTA reports published by the ANAES since 1994. The topics related to screening programmes, implantable devices and imaging modalities.
Methods: In preparing the reports we sought relevant economic studies by (i) searching MEDLINE, EMBASE Healthstar, Pascal and the NHS Economic Evaluation Database using economic and topic-related key-words, (ii) hand-searching the tables of contents of general medicine journals and of 5-10 specialty journals per topic, and (iii) seeking out unpublished data (reports, conference proceedings). Those studies that met a defined set of inclusion criteria were retained for analysis for quality of methodology and data.
Results: Electronic searching provided an average of 101 economic articles per topic (range : 14-195) of which 6 (range : 2-16) were of acceptable quality. Except for 2 reports, good quality references represented between 2 and 7 % of all articles identified. These economic references were often cost-minimisation studies (46 out of 61), sometimes cost-effectiveness studies (14 out of 61) and rarely cost-utility evaluations (1 out of 61).
Discussion: Use of bibliographic databases provides a fair number of references to economic evaluations but these are of varying quality and reliability. In fact, very few can be considered adequate for HTA.