The Role of Health Economics within Clinical Research

The pressure for health care systems to provide more resource-intensive health care and newer, more costly therapies is significant, despite limited health care budgets. It is not surprising, then, that demonstration that a new therapy is effective is no longer sufficient to ensure that it can be used in practice within publicly funded health care systems. The impact of the therapy on health care costs is also important and considered by decision makers, who must decide whether scarce resources should be invested in providing a new therapy. The impact of a therapy on both clinical benefits and costs can be estimated simultaneously using economic evaluation, the strengths and limitations of which are discussed. When planning a clinical trial, important economic outcomes can often be collected alongside the clinical outcome data, enabling consideration of the impact of the therapy on overall resource use, thus enabling performance of an economic evaluation, if appropriate.