Pharmacoeconomics

With increasing health care costs, an aging population that is living longer, and competing resource needs affecting all countries, a systematic way of ensuring a more efficient use of scarce health-related resources at all levels is very much needed. Drug therapy constitutes an essential part of health care, be it the prevention, treatment, cure, or mitigation of illness and disease. Drug therapy costs play a major role in health care expenditures around the world, second only to hospital care in direct medical care costs in the United States and to salaries within the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK). New pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals are particularly expensive, and so a system of evaluating their value to ensure that they are commensurate with their ...