With an aging population and increased prevalence of chronic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes mellitus, drug reforms are needed across Europe to ensure the continued provision of comprehensive healthcare. It is also a challenge, with the limited resources available, to fund new innovative...

Background: In 2005, a new technology appraisal process (the Single Technology Appraisal [STA]) was implemented by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), an independent agency that provides guidance to the UK NHS on the use of technology. The objective of STAs was to...

Economists engaged in comparative effectiveness research (CER) commonly adopt particular value judgements that underpin many of their methods. Two of these are the idea of a 'societal perspective' and that the foundation of values in measures of health outcome is individual preferences. This...

The application of cost-effectiveness analysis in healthcare has become commonplace in the US, but the validity of this approach is in jeopardy unless the proverbial $US50 000 per QALY benchmark for determining value for money is updated for the 21st century. While the initial aim of this...

Since 1999, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Technology Appraisal Programme has been charged with producing guidance for the NHS in England and Wales on the appropriate use of new and existing healthcare programmes. Guidance is based on an assessment of a number...

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has been using a cost-effectiveness threshold range between Lstg 20_000 and Lstg 30_000 for over 7 years. What the cost-effectiveness threshold represents, what the appropriate level is for NICE to use, and what the other factors...

Objective: To describe the pharmacoeconomic assessment process in Ireland and to provide examples of recent appraisals and the subsequent impact on pricing and reimbursement decisions. Method: The pharmacoeconomic appraisals conducted by the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics (NCPE) between...

Background: A common way of describing UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) decisions is to distinguish between cases where NICE recommended use of a healthcare technology by all relevant patients ('yes'); those where it did not recommend use ('no'); and those where...

DOI: 10.2165/0019053-200826110-00001