Pharmacoeconomic Research with Antibacterials

Abstract

Over the past few years the discipline of health economics has experienced an extraordinary boom within the healthcare sector. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines have developed new techniques to evaluate the impact of clinical care and medical technology. Clinicians, pharmacists, economists, epidemiologists and operations researchers have contributed to the new field of clinical economics to study how different approaches to patient care influence the resources consumed in clinical medicine. In front of the basic economic notion that resources are limited and desires as well as needs are infinite, health economists try to find solutions on how these resources are allocated appropriately to maximize the production of health. The common denominator is to search for increased efficiency and effectiveness of health care services and products. Among these efforts several researchers, especially within the pharmaceutical industry, have begun to study the economic impact of medicines on health care provision on a micro- and macroeconomic level. The new field of research, pharmacoeconomics, has grown at a tremendous rate, supplying ample evidence of the economic benefits of modern therapeutics. Not all products, however, have to be the subject of an economic evaluation. A simple decision tool is displayed in Table 1. This morphologic box takes the two main outcomes of a potential evaluation into consideration: costs and clinical results or quality of a medical intervention.