Issues for Statisticians in Pharmaco-economic Evaluations

Economic evaluations of new pharmaceutical products are of increasing importance to pharmaceutical companies. In this paper we investigate a number of topics of greater or lesser importance to statisticians who need to involve themselves in pharmaco-economic evaluations. These range from the need to consider whether traditional randomized clinical trials provide the most appropriate setting for an economic evaluation, to the more technical question of how to handle cost-effectiveness ratio data, including the issue of the most appropriate inferential apparatus-hypothesis testing, confidence intervals or Bayesian methods.