Pang F, Tolley K; International Society of Technology Assessment in Health Care. Meeting.
Annu Meet Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Meet. 1999; 15: 120.
Centre for Health Economics, University of York, York, UK.
OBJECTIVE: In recent years, a number of primers, standards and guidelines from government, the pharmaceutical industry and academia have appeared in the pursuit of promoting 'good practice' and improving the overall quality of economic evaluations. However, none of these contain the logical next step: a scoring system which evaluates and summarizes the quality of the studies. This research investigates whether a quality assessment scoring system can be developed for published economic evaluations, and discusses how such a system can assist in clearly identifying studies of a better quality, which in-turn would provide the evidence to allow priorities to be set in a more explicit manner. We explore various clinical quality assessment scoring scales and checklists, and discuss the characteristics that a quality scoring system for economic studies might contain. We construct a scoring system based on an adaption of the British Medical Journal Working Party 35-point checklist, and illustrate its application to a case-study of the most costly disease in mental health: schizophrenia. METHODS: A literature search comprising databases and handsearches was conducted for the period 1966-1997. The inclusion criteria were (i) the study considered both the costs, and cost or health consequences of alternative health programmes for schizophrenia; (ii) the study was published in English; (iii) the majority (i.e. >50%) of the patients sampled had a diagnosis of schizophrenia or related psychoses. The studies were scored according to the maximum total which could be achieved for each study. Selected items (e.g. perspective) were given more weighting according to their importance as determined by a recent survey of health economists. RESULTS: Thirty studies met the inclusion criteria. The studies either considered alternative methods of service delivery (mainly community based) or the use of novel antipsychotic drugs such as clozapine or risperidone. 17 studies were performed in the US, 7 in the UK, and 6 elsewhere. The quality scores ranged from 43-88%. CONCLUSIONS: It is shown that our scoring approach may be one reasonable method of summarizing methodological quality. Further research needs to be performed on the development of economic quality assessment scoring methods and the link between the quality of economic information to their effects on decision-making.
Publication Types:
Keywords:
- Biomedical Research
- Evaluation Studies
- Humans
- Periodicals
- Physical Examination
- Publishing
- economics
- methods
- hsrmtgs
Other ID:
UI: 102194087
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