Guidelines Comparison
What can I learn from the existing health economic evaluation guidelines?
Health economic evaluation guidelines provide methodological guidance on how to design, conduct and report economic evaluation studies. The details of methodological specification and perspective vary according to the purpose of these guidelines in each country.
2.1. Which countries currently have health economic evaluation guidelines?
(Below is a list of countries that have guidelines in English. If a country provides a guideline other than in English, it will appear in the parenthesis)
High-Income Countries
Upper-Middle-Income Countries
Lower-Middle-Income Countries
Low-Income Countries
2.2. What can we learn from comparing certain guidelines?
There is a paucity of commonly accepted health economic evaluation guidelines in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). In order to explore the acceptability and applicability of existing guidelines in LMICs, key features of a few guidelines listed below have been selected and compared.
The WHO guide to cost-effectiveness analysis and the Reference case (developed by iDSI) have been included because both aim for use in LMICs. The WHO guideline is widely used and accepted in LMICs, especially in countries that do not have their own health economic evaluation guidelines. The Reference case, different from the WHO guideline, was designed to provide guiding principles for conducting economic evaluations and was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), which is a major funder of economic evaluations in LMICs.
In many countries, national guidelines specify the methods and reporting protocol for economic evaluations conducted in the country. Thailand’s guideline “Guidelines for Health Technology Assessment in Thailand (Second edition)” has been included as an example of a country-specific guideline from LMICs. The England & Wales’ National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guideline “Guide to the methods of technology appraisal 2013” has been selected to provide a comparative perspective from high income countries.
Lastly, the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) has set up Task Forces that produce series of “ISPOR Good Practices for Outcome Research”. These have been included as they represent expert consensus guidance for specific topics in economic evaluation.
Learn more about each guideline by clicking the name of guidelines listed below or compare topics in two or more guidelines by using the “Query box”.