Methodological approaches to pharmaco-economics.

Due to the increased need for cost-containment policies, most decision makers are facing the issue of the efficiency of health care strategies. In this context, economic evaluation becomes a major instrument. However, the credibility of economic data depends on a number of methodological steps: selection of strategy of economic evaluation (cost/effectiveness, cost/benefit, generation of economic hypotheses, study design (cross-sectional, prospective, naturalistic), data collection (data-base, physicians), data analysis (costing, statistics). In this respect, the conduct of proper economic evaluation relies on a combination of expertise in clinical epidemiology as well as in health economics.